Hi visitor! This is the Skritter newsletter. Look for it on the 15th of each month. In this issue: the monthly stats, mnemonic puzzles, new features, and an interview with Skritterer junglegirl!
Monthly Stats: Hours spent: 7,377 // Items studied: 5,637,079 // Characters learned: 92,993 // Retention: 89.54%
Cool Mnemonics - see if you can guess what characters go with which memory device!
citroenamy: Silk in that colour is absolutely hopeless.
sarac: Brushing the teeth of a corpse requires a towel and a knife?
hiphopillit: When two kings have to share one knife, they must work as a team.
New Features in October
List Images
Since the dawn of the new list system, every list on the site had your avatar (or a default Skritter) to identify it. Now you can upload custom images to distinguish your own vocabulary lists. Read about it here.
Quick Add Shortcut
For those of you who have always wanted the ability to add vocabulary from anywhere on the site, your day has come. You can now summon the quick add dialogue on any page with the press of two keys: Shift+A.
Quick Add Page
We have built a page to handle quick adding. It's accessible via the My Words page and allows you to get a better handle on material that might otherwise be difficult to manage. All those words you add on the fly can now be tamed.
Quick Add Bar
In addition to the new quick add shortcut, when you add content outside of the designated popup, you now have more options about how and where exactly you want to add new vocabulary. You might want to check this out.
Beta Site
We've broken our own site a few times, it's true. Sorry! But that's a thing of the past now that we have a beta server which stands between us and the live site. If you'd like to test new features on beta, just visit beta.skritter.com.
Vacation Mode
Most subscription services have an easy way to suspend accounts, and now Skritter does too! Traveling for a while? Use the vacation mode to suspend billing and have it pick up again when you get back. Enjoy your trip--Skritter will miss you!
User Interview: junglegirl
SWAT teams and the Chinese countryside: this is her Chinese journey.
Hi everyone, I'm Wendy, also known as junglegirl. I'm originally from Alabama in the southern US but have travelled and lived in many countries around the world. Languages have always been a great passion of mine, and about one year ago I finally made a career out of them by working at the United Nations in Geneva, where I translate documents from French and Spanish into English. Oddly enough, I had no interest at all in Chinese until relatively recently. In 2008 I even lived in Beijing, where I was working for the Olympic Games Organizing Committee, but learned virtually no Chinese during that time because I was already enjoying studying Russian and knew that I couldn't handle both at once.
It was not until the next year, when I started travelling around China, that I found out the hard way how much I really needed to learn some Chinese. Apart from Beijing and Guangzhou where we had been working, the first region of China that my husband and I visited was the remote province of Gansu. Not many foreigners make it out there, and English has not made much headway, so we had great difficulties performing daily tasks like checking into a hotel or buying bus tickets. This was made even more difficult because some of the archaic restrictions on foreigners that have disappeared in most of the country are still sporadically enforced in Gansu, and the recent protests by Tibetans had resulted in even tighter restrictions, of which we were unaware. Sometimes people would refuse to sell us bus tickets and we had no idea why. Once, a police van screeched to a halt next to us and we were quickly surrounded by six policemen with the word "SWAT" embroidered on their uniforms. It turned out we had unknowingly crossed into a Tibetan area that at that time was off-limits to foreigners.
After two weeks of banging my head against the language barrier in Gansu, I decided I had to learn some survival Chinese. Fast. I did a quick internet search, found ChinesePod, downloaded a few newbie lessons and I was hooked! I've now been studying Chinese for two and a half years, and it has become my number one hobby. I started out studying just with ChinesePod, but now one of the perks of working at the UN is that I get to take free Chinese lessons. I had ignored writing characters completely until I joined the UN classes, so I had a lot of catching up to do, but with Skritter it didn't take that long for my writing skills to catch up to my speaking, reading and listening. My goal is to eventually be able to translate from Chinese to English, which I hope to be ready for in about a year from now.
[Image used courtesy of Jungleboy]
Top Learners This Month
saju
Time Spent: 73 hours
New Words Learned: 1158
New Chars Learned: 281
Total Chars Learned: 2528
joshwhitson13
Time Spent: 62 hours
New Words Learned: 400
New Chars Learned: 160
Total Chars Learned: 2575
jmonroe2china
Time Spent: 52 hours
New Words Learned: 193
New Chars Learned: 148
Total Chars Learned: 876
ned08
Time Spent: 51 hours
New Words Learned: 222
New Chars Learned: 146
Total Chars Learned: 1319
Kawe
Time Spent: 47 hours
New Words Learned: 1171
New Chars Learned: 596
Total Chars Learned: 1334
revusky
Time Spent: 45 hours
New Words Learned: 174
New Chars Learned: 100
Total Chars Learned: 2842
