Hi visitor! This is the Skritter newsletter. Look for it on the 15th of each month. In this issue: new features, a power user interview, and a new learning challenge.
Monthly Stats: Hours spent: 3,644 // Items studied: 2,797,880 // Characters learned: 52,746 // Retention: 90.58%
New Features
Mnemonics
Skritter now lets you save mnemonics to speed up your learning. For June, create as many winning mnemonics as you can for a chance to win cool Skritter swag! Read below in the contest section for more details.
Custom Definitions
Have you ever wanted to alter a definition to better fit your learning context? Well, now you can. Use this feature to customize your definitions and submit suggestions for changes to us. Just click on the definition, enter your change, and keep moving.
Character Decompositions
No more switching to and from dictionaries to see character decomps--now you can do that on the practice page. This feature works great with the mnemonics system: just glance at the components and create mnemonics to match!
New List Editor
The old list editor was something of a mess. To create a list you had to enter, validate, process, and then choose whether to publish or save your list. We've been working for the past 6 weeks to overhaul it and the results are now online.
Starred Words
You can think of starred words as list building on the fly. I don't know about you, but I can never remember the difference between 放, 方, and 房, and without seeing them together it's tough to make progress. Now you can mark pesky items as you go.
More Base Languages
We start to support base languages other than English! We've got a lot of Chinese-Russian and Chinese-German definitions in the system now, with more to come, and you can start adding your own definitions in other languages now.
User Interview: 穆儿
穆儿 has been a Skritterer for about 6 months and already knows more than 2800 characters. He has a cool blog that you can check out here that is both good Chinese reading practice and a lot of fun.
Just imagine: It's late in the evening, you're listening to Chinese "shepherd's songs" (牧歌) or cross talk comedy (相声), sipping your last cup of Longjing green tea (龙井茶)--and at the same time playing some kind of fascinating Flash game called "Skritter". Now the miraculous thing: The next morning, you get up, realize you've been dreaming in Chinese, and somehow you're suddenly able to use Chinese expressions, both written and spoken, that you didn't even recognize just a few days ago. 十全十美！尽善尽美！完美无缺!
Now I'm challenging my listening comprehension with absurd dialects, and I'm excited about characters like 麟 (female unicorn).
During a gap year as a teacher in China I got to know more than ten different provinces. That surely was a great experience, but, rather surprisingly, I've now realised that learning Chinese doesn't really have to depend on whether or not you can be in China. Both my oral skills and my listening comprehension are still constantly improving, mostly thanks to online radio and movies. And then there's Skritter: That little website helped me boost the number of characters I can write from about 200 to more than 2,800 in just about six months.
Now why do I do all that? In fact, I'm not quite sure about it myself. Chinese isn't part of my degree, and my original aims were rather modest. In January, I planned to reach 2000 characters within two years, then perhaps take an intermediate-level HSK exam. Now I'm challenging my listening comprehension with absurd dialects, and I'm excited about characters like 麟 (female unicorn). But maybe that's simply part of some kind of phenomenon we could call the "Skritter effect" ...
Favourite Chinese word: 凹凸 (bumpy)
Favourite TV drama: 老大的幸福 (especially the beginning)
Favourite song: 东方红
"If you would like to share your Chinese learning story, reply to this email and let us know!
June Mnemonics Challenge
Create Mnemonics, Get Rewarded
This learning challenge is really simple: between now and July 15th, create as many winning mnemonics as you can! At the end of the time period, the 3 people with the most winning mnemonics will get their choice of a free Skritter T-shirt, mug, or water bottle.
What is a "winning mnemonic", exactly? We have set up the mnemonics to work via a popular voting system. If a word or character has a mnemonic that has been shared, it will be displayed to everyone. Every person has the option to use a publicly shared mnemonic, their own, or none at all. A winning mnemonic is one that is chosen for use by other people. This means that the mnemonics you enter should be useful, or else other users won't choose them.
How do I create good mnemonics? Creating good mnemonics isn't easy. We recommend using the character decomps and radical definitions to create short (as in one phrase or one short sentence) explanations. The best mnemonics incorporate a story aspect that is both interesting and accurate. Here are three examples of good mnemonics:
好: "A woman and a child are good."
安: "A woman with a roof over her head is calm."
怕: "My heart is white with fear."
You can use asterisks and underscores to make some words in mnemonics *bold* and _italic_, and you can include images: img:http://www.example.com/images/unicorn.png
