Hi visitor! This is the Skritter newsletter. Look for it on the 15th of each month. In this issue: the monthly stats, top mnemonics and learners, an interview with Skritterer Revusky, and an iOS app update.
An iPhone App Teaser Page and Video
We have some good news for everyone who is waiting on a mobile version of Skritter: we've put together a page where you can get more information about the product, sign up for development updates, and even watch our shiny new teaser video. Plus, we're giving away an iPad! It's all happening over at the newly created iPhone teaser page. Check it out, sign up, and enjoy the preview of things to come!
Monthly Stats: Hours spent: 8,243 // Items studied: 6,529,591 // Characters learned: 101,740 // Retention: 90.29%
Cool Mnemonics - see if you can guess what characters go with which memory device!
Grahameh: The person resembles an elephant.
Denbeau: Iron is a metal that can't fail.
ndsino: Cakes are made of rice and lamb and baked on a fire.
Top Learners This Month
saju
Time Spent: 111 hours!
New Words Learned: 1920
New Chars Learned: 483
Total Chars Learned: 3075
admiralbird
Time Spent: 66 hours
New Words Learned: 380
New Chars Learned: 160
Total Chars Learned: 2114
joshwhitson13
Time Spent: 59 hours
New Words Learned: 95
New Chars Learned: 103
Total Chars Learned: 2899
mats
Time Spent: 52 hours
New Words Learned: 233
New Chars Learned: 458
Total Chars Learned: 561
revusky
Time Spent: 50 hours
New Words Learned: 360
New Chars Learned: 61
Total Chars Learned: 2923
marleendemol
Time Spent: 47 hours
New Words Learned: 180
New Chars Learned: 58
Total Chars Learned: 1965
Because It Is There
Top learner Revusky explains his motivation
I started studying Chinese in January of 2010. I had in the back of my mind that I wanted to learn Chinese for at least 20 years before that, but had never got round to it. Finally, I did. Part of it is that I do enjoy studying languages. Chinese is my sixth language, I guess. But the other thing is that I am half Chinese on my mother's side. However, my mother is an ABC, an American-born Chinese, the kind who asks for a fork in a Chinese restaurant. She did speak some Cantonese as a child (not a word of Mandarin) and still passively understands a fair bit, I suspect, but I never learned any Chinese as a child, as you can imagine. And I was never really encouraged to take any interest, since the implicit ideology in my family was very assimilationist, though barely even consciously so, just that was they way things were. The idea formed in my twenties that I would like to learn Chinese, but it took over twenty more years for me to do anything about it.
Here is a true story (I am not imaginative enough to make it up). I told a girl in China I was born in Kentucky, Ken-de-ji, which I was, and she was amazed by that. She said that she had never met anybody who was born in Ken-de-ji before. I could not understand why she found this so amazing. After all, I had to have been born somewhere. I eventually figured out that she thought I was born in a KFC outlet. This was the only Ken-de-ji she knew of, didn't realize that it was one of the fifty states.
I have no business-related objective. I am doing this purely for cultural interest. My aim is to reach the same level in Chinese that I have in French or Spanish, which is basically not far from native-level fluency, the ability to read literature in the language and so on, what you could expect a college graduate who is native in that language to be able to do. As for the question of why, it is basically the same reason that what's his name climbed Everest: because it is there.
That's the December newsletter. We have all been hard at work on the iOS app and are preparing to put mobile character learning in your palm as soon as we can. While we do that, get out there and learn even more characters next month!
The Skritter Team
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