Skritter Forum

When to use 麼 vs 麽

2010-03-09T21:39:20Z

xkfowboa: There appears to be two ways to write this character, anyone know the history of this or when to use which one?

characters disappearing from my list?

2010-03-09T20:24:41Z

ulyart: I haven't ever deleted a word from my list, but since yesterday my number of words "added" has shrunk. (The same thing has happened to my number of words "learned" - but that would be easier to explain, at least with my current understanding of added and learned words)

Indeed my stats show 746 words learned for 712 words added.

Shouldn't the number of words learned always be lower than the number of words added? Am I misunderstanding the concept of added and learned words?

hmm... or maybe 712 is the number of added and as of yet unlearned words and 746 the number of added AND learned words? Which would add up to a total of 1458 characters added since I've been using Skritter?

In case you had any doubts that 汉字 were really necessary...

2010-03-09T15:24:46Z

digilypse: ...well, here's a story made up entirely of "shi". Good luck understanding the pinyin version! Read carefully - it does make sense!

石室诗士施氏，嗜食狮，誓食十狮。适施氏时时适市视狮。十时，适十狮适市。是时，适施氏适市。氏视是十狮，恃矢势，使是十狮逝世。氏拾是十狮尸，适石室。石室湿，氏使侍拭石室。石室拭，氏始试食是十狮尸。食时，始识是十狮尸，实十石狮尸。试释是事。
(source,explanation and background:　http://baike.baidu.com/view/19225.htm)

Anyone have similar examples of weird/interesting pieces of writing?

RTK

2010-03-09T13:35:08Z

Yolan: Being convinced recently of the power of Heisig's Remembering the Kanji Method (after _years_ of failure trying to simply cram Kanji into my head) I've actually found it difficult to make use of Skritter.

Using Anki (an SRS for those who don't know it) I can include the 'story' of the Kanji I am studying. Unfortunately when trying to make RTK lists for Skritter I can only include words. This is a reason why I have stopped using Skritter entirely for the last few weeks.

Skritter devs, I love what you guys have done so far (hence I bought a years membership), but I am hoping you are working on expanding the versatility of the system.

Will the option to include test questions be included in a future version?

How can I learn hiragana using Skritter?

2010-03-09T05:26:27Z

lennier61: Pls help, I would like to learn hiragana, and practice it, is it possible?

The ultimate writing pad device (on a budget) for Skritter!

2010-03-08T21:13:57Z

drvelocity: I picked up a Benq S6 MID PC for $200 (here in Taiwan, in the states Best Buy used to have it for only $150, not sure if it's still available or not). The S6 is a 5" LCD pen input MID PC (no keyboard) that weighs just under a pound, and includes an 800Mhz Atom processor, 512MB RAM, Windows XP, 8GB SSD, Intel GMA500 chipset.

The newest Flash beta, 10.1, supports hardware acceleration for the GMA500, and I'm happy to say that Skritter actually runs pretty quickly on the S6 with the new Beta!

Here's a youtube video I shot with my iphone to show a quick demo of how the site runs on the S6:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2VgVAtgO6Q0

For the most part I can write as quickly as I can, although the framerate isn't always 100% smooth. As you can see, the glow effect at the end of drawing a character always causes a stutter as well - that's probably the major annoyance I can think of, and it would be great to have an option to turn this off. But for $200 I'm certainly not going to complain - I came this close to spending $800 on a used Wacom Cintiq tablet to hook up to my Mac.

If you wanted to step up to something a bit faster, for $500 you can pick up a Viliv S5 with a 1.33Ghz Atom processor (and everything else pretty much the same) that should improve speeds. But to me the extra $300 isn't worth it.

"handwritten" dictionary

2010-03-08T15:33:18Z

smhon: Currently using an F109 to do this, but the screen is rather small and strains the eye.

Does anyone know of a weblink that can recognise a handwritten character input (even if slightly wrong) and make a "best guess" choice followed by translation?

At present the dictionaries I've seen all require pinyin or a type-written character. Not much help when unable to guess the pinyin.

Wow! (Questions and thoughts after a week of using Skritter)

2010-03-08T15:27:54Z

drvelocity: First of all I'd like to commend the developers of this site for undertaking such a massive task (i.e. programming custom flash modules for thousands of individual Chinese characters) and creating an awesome study tool for those of us toiling through the process of learning one of the hardest languages in the world. In just a few short days of using the site I've definitely noticed an impact on my writing abilities, i.e. stroke order mistakes that I've never been aware of in the past are getting slowly corrected. I think it's fair to say I'm addicted!

Now then, I do have a question and some suggestions for the developers:

Questions:

1. I have a single list of vocab that I'm drawing from at the moment for practice, and I've set the Add Word Frequency to "Early and Often" (after looking for a loooong time and finally finding this setting in "account settings" of all places). However when I go to practice, I only get a set of about 8 words which constantly repeat themselves, even if I get them all right I still get the same set of 8 words unless I manually refresh the page, in which case I just get another 8 words. I assumed that the software would look at which words I get right and naturally swap those out for new words that haven't yet been tested or haven't been tested in X amount of time? How exactly does this whole process work? How many times do I have to write a word correctly before it's "learned"? To me, if I write a word correctly the first time it should be automatically counted as "learned", but that doesn't seem to be the case. I read through the entire site for info on this and found no basic description of exactly what is supposed to be going on during the practice sessions. In the end I'm just getting frustrated without any kind of real feeling of progress.

I tried changing to "manually add words to practice", assuming that the little green plus sign would let me add new words to my practice queue, but it simply goes gray after starting a session. The "X to review" number seems to jump around randomly, and I see no way to find out exactly where this number is coming from. Additionally the page is showing "added 4" constantly, but which 4 words were added? Every time I refresh the page I get 8 or so different words. And again, no matter how long I write the same 8 words, I never see any new ones without reloading.

For what it's worth, here's how I envision the learning process would work best, at least for me:

The software looks at my entire vocabulary pool and generates a score for each word based on percentage of times the word was written incorrectly (no impact if it has never been written), and the amount of time elapsed since the word was last tested. As I continue practicing, the software automatically draws from my vocabulary pool in order of the aforementioned score. In this way I can write as few or as many characters as I want in a given session and always be guaranteed to be testing the characters I need to learn the most at any given time. It would be helpful and easy at this point to offer some kind of "meter" that shows where the word I am currently writing relatively fits in this score range. If I'm on a "high-score" character that I've written incorrectly 60% of the time, and hasn't been written in 2 weeks, it's safe to say there would probably be many other "high score" words in my queue, and the meter could display as "full", meaning I have a lot of work to do to lower the scores of these relatively difficult words. If I keep up with my reviews, and the current word I'm working on is one that I've written a week ago and written correctly 95% of the time, the meter would read closer to "empty", as there are fewer words in the pool that badly need to be reviewed.

The next point I want to make has to do with the price setup for the site. In my strong opinion, $9.99 a month is far, far too expensive and I truly believe this pricing scheme will turn away a great number of customers - in the end I think you will lose money by charging this much. Your learning system is intended to work over long periods of time - months, and for those of us who stick with learning the language, years.

By setting a montly fee instead of a one time flat rate fee, as a potential customer I immediately start calculating in my head - $120 a year.. $600 for 5 years (the average time it takes for someone to get decently fluent in Chinese). Ouch.

Undoubtedly your software took immense time and resources to develop and you should be rewarded for that - but $600 for 5 years of usage is downright scary. Personally I would feel a lot more comfortable paying a one time fee of $50-$100 for a lifetime subscription to the service. But if you insist on a montly price scheme, $3-5 a month would be a much easier pill to swallow.

Look at the Iphone games market as an example - the top developers are making millions by selling games for $1 to very high percentages of Iphone owners. You could do the same - become the indispensible tool for Chinese learners by making the price so low you'd be stupid not to use the service. The question of course is, at a price point of $5 a month does your market increase by at least 2 times? Yes I think it absolutely would. Where the optimum profit line lies if you graphed this out is impossible to know but I can tell you it is not at $9.99 a month.

Back to the one-time payment pricing model, one benefit to you would be not having to worry about competetitors taking your current customers - if I'm only on a monthly pricing plan, and a competitor comes along with a better deal, I'll jump ship right away. On the other hand, if you've already gotten my $50 up front, whether or not any competitors come into the picture later is a moot point, at least as far as your established customer base is concerned. Your first in the race to create a learning tool like this and if I were you I'd be interested in getting as much up front as possible.

The other benefit is exploiting the vast majority of learners who, at the beginning of the learning process, have great expectations for themselves and "know" that they'll stick with the program for years, making the up front payment of $X easily worth it, and 4 weeks down the road realize they aren't as interested as they thought they would be. This is why most gym memberships tend to be based in years rather than months.

Obviously it's your business to run but I think you have incredible potential with this site so I wanted to make clear my feelings on this in detail. So enough with that. :)

One other point - you definitely need to make the "help" section much more prominent on the site. Right now the way everything is set up, it is very difficult to figure out exactly how to use the site, and the only way to learn about how to use it is to click a tiny help link on the bottom of the page. Even then most of the information is outdated and seemingly pertains to an older version of the site. At the very least I would suggest having a basic getting started page that goes through the basics of adding vocab and various settings for practicing, explaining how everything words as opposed to simply detailing what various options mean.

Whew - that's all I've got for now - thanks for reading/helping!

help

2010-03-08T11:49:46Z

Could someone help me in translation. I used Google and other online translators but none of them was usefull.
樠睩汬⁧漠橯戠慦瑥爠㨨ഊ
thanks o lot

tone error

2010-03-08T11:18:22Z

grahaml: pillow = zhĕntou 枕头 I believe the tou should be neutral tone.

不下

2010-03-07T22:59:28Z

wallaby78erik: I see that this is listed with two fourth tones, and I'm wondering why this word doesn't follow tone sandhi rules. Anybody know why?

Potential bug in the SRS mode

2010-03-07T22:17:36Z

tunghiem2010: I just nuked my account today( I created and subscribed last night), and added about 30 words this morning. However, this afternoon when I started practicing in the SRS mode, Skritter gave me words that I had studied 7 days ago (!!??!). How can it be possible when I just added those words this morning, and this is the second time I have seen them?

It makes no sense at all! Please come and help this newbie.

Computer terminology

2010-03-07T21:56:55Z

xkfowboa: There are two custom lists which list basically computer hardware terminology. Does anyone know of a list that focues on chinese required to navigate the menus in an OS？

Would be very handy for learning to use computers which are in chinese.

Check review build up

2010-03-07T19:51:13Z

ZachH: It would be cool if we could see how many reviews are scheduled to occur within 24hrs. Then I could manage my load more effectively and not add words when I have a lot of reviews coming up soon.

Script lagging

2010-03-07T13:05:30Z

muer: Just out of interest: Don't you have nearly unlimited scalability because of Google App Engine?

I had to give up practice after experiencing lags (flashing green dots, no progress without reloading the page) in intervals of sometimes less than a minute.

[Just another note: Twitter and e-mail reminders apparently haven't worked for a few days: http://twitter.com/#search?q=skritter%20days]

inputting tones with wacoom

2010-03-07T09:59:30Z

Baifameizhong: before I get to the issue I entered as the main subject....what does the general setting option "use wacoom plugin" actually do?

and now to my main question: is there a trick to entering the tones with the pen? I more often than not know the right tone and draw the according line but somehow skritter doesn't recognise it and marks it wrong. This is particularly true for first tones (which it often reads as fourth tones) and second tones which it often things are third tones.
Although I could of course use either tonal buttons at the bottom or the num pad, I would definitely be more comfortable to just draw them....

Any tips?

Scheduling Problem

2010-03-07T05:20:41Z

shinyspoons: I don't know if its just me, but there is something up with the scheduling. Even though I have 300+ characters to review all character's stats are listed like this:

studied -267499 sec ago: not due (70%)

and I am getting some characters coming up again and again.

Can you help.

Thanks

Queue allows duplicate entries

2010-03-06T22:34:45Z

Kai: Hi,

it seems that the queue currently does not work as it supposed to do. Normally I add lists of thirty random words and let Skritter sort out what is already in my study lists. However, at the moment it fails to do so and just adds duplicates to the queue.

Cheers
凯

否歪甭丕孬奀嫑盃: 8 characters learned in a minute

2010-03-06T22:10:55Z

muer: Just for fun ...

奀 and 嫑 aren't really used in the real world.

Ordered according to their frequency on 百度:

否 [fǒu] = 不 + 口 (e.g. negate) | 77,900,000
歪 [wāi]= 不 + 正 (e.g. askew) | 54,400,400
甭 [béng] = 不 + 用（不用) | 9,700,000
丕 [pī] = 不 + 一 (big) | 7,830,000
孬 [nāo] = 不 + 好 (bad, cowardly) | 3,860,000
奀 [ēn] = 不 + 大 | 370,000
嫑 [biáo] [báo] = 不 + 要 | 195,000
盃 [bēi] = 不 + 皿 = (same as 杯, often used for trophies) | frequency unknown

Do you know more?

server error

2010-03-06T20:42:34Z

ulyart: This has been happening repeatedly since yesterday:

While practicing I get the "server error (we're on it)" message. After this message appears, I can practice about three more words, and then the service stalls.

Forcing my browser to reload the page allows me to take up practice again... at least until the next "server error" message.

My question is, by repeatedly forcing page reloading, might I be unknowingly messing up my spaced repetition schedule?

Should I wait instead for the the problem to be resolved before taking up practice again?

By the way, congratulations for a wonderful service!

Scheduling issue with pinyin practice

2010-03-05T21:18:25Z

gacorley: I have to say pinyin practice looks pretty well ready to go for an alpha. Only problem I see is that the pinyin almost invariably comes immediately before definition practice, which totally ruins the value of the definition practice since not only did you just see the definition -- but it was actually in a similar location to where it would be on the flashcard.

I presume this will be fixed before it's final, but I wanted to bring it up.

Can't add new vocabulary

2010-03-05T11:20:03Z

esther: When I add a new word in the practise page the + button stays grey thereafter. I have to leave the practise page and come back. Then I can add one single new word. My account hasn't expired and I haven't changed my settings. Any ideas where the problem could be?

A more natural input device?

2010-03-05T11:13:18Z

smhon: Just back from the physio today. Been informed that my old CTS injury has flared up from overuse of the mouse. (Skritter is addictive!)

Just wonder if there is a more 'natural' input device that can ease joint strain and also works with Skritter?

Spectator mode

2010-03-04T03:53:37Z

mjd: Hello,

Several people who've seen me using Skritter say it's mesmerising to watch someone write characters. What I'd really like (and Xmas is so far away!) is a back-seat mode, so I can set people (friends near and far) up with a URL whereby they can watch me skrittering.

Doesn't have to be the skritter user's strokes, could be the formal strokes, but paced to when the skritter user is entering them...

Would make great eye candy!

New Poll

2010-03-03T21:28:29Z

JB: Is skewed! There are missing options =___=