Selecting a Vocabulary List

When you first arrive on the site, you will need to select a vocabulary list from which to study. To do this, go to the vocabulary tab and click the lists button:

On the vocabulary lists page, click on the Textbooks link on the left sidebar and select a list you would like to study. For the sake of brevity, let's assume you'd like to just start from the beginning of a textbook (to read more about how to add lists, read the sections entitled "Adding Lists" in the User's Guide).

Once the list is loaded, click on the play button. Now you're all set to start practicing, click on the practice tab near the Skritter logo.

Using the Practice Page

Once on the practice page, you will be prompted to write the characters based on pinyin and definitions. If you don't know a character, press the Show button. Skritter will automatically prompt you to write the characters with the correct stroke order. If you draw a character out of order, the stroke that should have come next will faintly throb to let you know.

When you have finished one prompt, the character and the flash box itself will glow green, blue, or red. Green means you got the prompt right, blue means you are learning it (you've never gotten it right yet), and red means you have remembered the character in the past but not this time. After the character glows, click the Next button to continue to the next prompt.

You can view your progress by expanding the vocabulary progress viewer in the middle of the page.

Tweaking Vocabulary Settings

If you'd like to customize your Skrittering experience a little bit, hover over the vocabulary drop down and click on the options button.

The most important option on this page is the Add Word Frequency selector. This drop down determines how hard Skritter will push you in your efforts to learn characters. If you practice regularly and more than enough to finish each review queue, increase this frequency. If you often just want to maintain words by finishing a review and not adding anything extra, decrease this frequency.

You can also select whether you'd like to study simplified or traditional characters (or both).

Skritter defaults to automatically advancing to the next section in a list. However, if you'd like to focus your learning or just want more control, you can change the section switching from automatic to manual.

The target retention rate affects the length of intervals between reviews. If you don't mind moving slower and seeing items more often (and thus remembering a higher percent), leave the retention rate high. If, however, you'd like to move fast and don't mind too much if you forget a few, you can lower this target and reduce the number of review prompts you receive.

Best Practices

To maximize the enjoyment and benefit you receive from using Skritter, here are three tips:

1) When you first start out, add vocabulary cautiously until you have established a comfortable study rhythm.

Remember, Skritter is designed to prevent you from ever forgetting the stuff you study, and no matter how you look at it, that process takes time. Sure, you can plow through 500 characters in a day, but that will create an enormous pile of items to review the next time you log in, and because you added all the items at once, they will all come up for review at approximately the same times, making it really difficult to spread out a huge review load. Add slowly at first, give it a week or so and see how it feels and then dig in if you are feeling underwhelmed.

2) Try writing as quickly as you feel comfortable.

Skritter is intended to make practicing characters efficient and the truth of the matter is that it isn't efficient to carefully sculpt each character, especially if you know it. Hit each one quickly and move on. If you get it wrong, don't sweat it and don't feel the need to write it a bunch of times at once. Skritter knows you missed it and will give it to you until you remember, which is more efficient than repeating it with no delay.

3) Honestly evaluate your own memory.

If you get a character wrong because of a problem on our end, use the Correct button to mark it right, and unless you really want to avoid an item, accept an incorrect whenever you can bear it. Skritter is built to assume that you are correct until proven very wrong, but that system only works optimally if you accurately mark yourself right and wrong when ambiguous cases arise.