Skritter Blog | Developing the Best Chinese and Japanese Practice Tool

Wacoms a'comin'

2010-03-10T16:50:00.002-05:00

Is using the mouse for Skritter getting you down? We have talked for some time about introducing Wacom writing tablets on the website, and now we are days away from introducing them. I made a mockup for Scott a little while ago and he is now in the throes of creating a system that will allow people to purchase the tablets on Skritter. You will have the option to use a credit card that is on file or enter a new credit card, shipping will be done through FedEx, and we will be unable to offer international shipping (this is just because our reseller's shipping rates are much higher than larger companies like Amazon). If you, like 50% of our user base, are living abroad, we will provide you links to larger resellers that will offer more competitive shipping rates.

The Wacom store will be linked to from the home page. You can see how that interface will look below:

The Wacom store it self will look like this:

The prices have been intentionally blurred out because we are we have not finalized our pricing decisions. As we have mentioned before both in form topics and e-mails, we will be offering Wacom tablets at discounted prices. We will not be making any profit from selling the tablets, we see the real benefits of offering them as simply enhancing the user experience. All three of us have been using Skritter with tablets for quite a while and they make the accuracy, ergonomics, and general user experience dramatically better. If it costs us some lost profit to make your user experience that much better, we are willing to lose the money.

The challenge of 谦虚: learning to be a humble Chinese language student

2010-03-06T18:28:00.004-05:00

Hello to the Skritter community! I’ve been lurking behind the scenes for the past half year, proofreading and translating entries in the skritter database. Now that Christopher and Gabriel are on board to handle the back end vocabulary linguistics work, I’ll be doing some guest blogging on a variety of topics related to learning Chinese.

A little background info first - I’ve studied Chinese for three and a half years. The first year was at Oberlin College and the second two were in China where I was teaching English at the Shanxi Agricultural University. Now I’m living back in Oberlin where I’m an ESL teacher (for Chinese high school students) by day and a heavy Skritter/Chinesepod user by night.

The challenge of 谦虚: learning to be a humble Chinese language student

To kick off the series of posts, I’d like to discuss humbleness in Chinese culture and how that affects the Chinese language learner. The roots of humbleness go way back in Chinese culture to Confucius. In China today being humble is still an encouraged and expected behaviour. Chinese people are taught to be 谦虚 (humble) and to avoid 吹牛 (lit. blowing the cow, meaning to brag). Chinese school children all learn the saying by Chairman Mao, “谦虚使人进步，骄傲使人落后” (Being humble makes people improve, and being arrogant causes one to fall behind).

During my time in China sometimes even the smallest conversations brought me face to face with the issue of being humble. Take for example a conversation at a bubble tea stand. I start it off: “I’d like a cup of bubble tea, please”. The seller responds, “Your Chinese is great!”. I have two choices now of how to reply. I could say, “Thanks!”, or I could say something humble like “No, actually my Chinese is very bad”. The danger with the “thanks!” response is that you run the risk of seeming too proud. I’ve found that the other choice is often met with a “Wow, you’re humble too!” comment, or at least a smile which probably means that the person is satisfied with my humbleness.

I remember one time I made the mistake of 吹牛 when I invited a couple of friends over for dinner at my house the night before I left for a vacation. I had “daizou-ed” (带走) a bunch of food from a restaurant near my house and prepared a goodbye meal. Towards the end of the meal when we were all past the point of being stuffed but still going strong my Chinese friends started to give me compliments, “You are a great friend to prepare all of this food for us! You are really are a generous guy!” All of a sudden a grammar pattern from language school popped into my mind and I spurted it out without thinking twice: “这到也是” (a slangy way of saying - this is true, I agree with you). My friends burst into laughter. They were expecting me to be humble and refute their praise but instead I had come off as a jerk with no sense of what is an appropriate response to compliments. Those friends and I remembered my faux pas fondly, often joking about it during the following year.

Compliments fly when foreigners speak Chinese in China. You need to be equipped with a set of humble ways to deflect those compliments. So for all of you Chinese speaking skritter users out there, what do you do in the face of a compliment about your language ability from a Chinese person? Do you have any embarrassing stories to share about forgetting to be humble in China?

Japanese Sounds Courtesy of Smart.fm

2010-03-05T14:18:00.002-05:00

We've just seeded our database with over six thousand words worth of audio files for Japanese! These sounds were made available through Smart.fm's developer API and the Creative Commons License. This API is quite extensive, and we plan in the future to use it to make their lists available to search through and study here at Skritter, much like we offer ChinesePod lists for Chinese users now.

Thanks to Smart.fm for making these resources available!

Active Pinyin Practice, France

2010-03-05T00:43:00.000-05:00

I've just uploaded the alpha version of the active pinyin practice that I've been working on. There are still several things I need to do to it, like making it look good, but it's got most of what we intend. If you're feeling adventurous, enable it on your practice settings, get some new words added with the pinyin part, and try it out! We need feedback on how usable it is and what would make it work better for you.

Here are the things it should be awesome at right now:

Figuring out which characters' pinyins and tones you know. Although it only tells you if you got the whole word and tones right or wrong, behind the scenes it also updates a word's component characters' items when it makes sense to do so. Efficient!
Turning the pinyin in your head into pinyin on the screen. Tone marks are handled with my elaborate scheme (tell me if you like it!), 儿化音 érhuàyīn are easy to input, and typos creating invalid pinyins should be prevented automatically.
Going fast! I think you'll chew through these like 孟子 Mèngzǐ chews through marshmallows.

But there are a few things which I haven't been able to do yet:

The prompt area outside the Flash looks weird.
The Genius doesn't yet group together similar items, so if you have multiple parts active to study, they'll be all mixed in and you'll have to switch between keyboard and mouse/pen more frequently than ideal.
The correct button and toggling grading indicators in the prompt don't work right yet, so don't use those on these pinyin prompts. If you want to change your score, retype the pinyin.
Long pinyins go off the screen, no back button shortcut, no tone coloring, and a few other minor things.
Not well tested. (Hope you can help here!)

I would wait to upload until I did those things, but I'm going to go explore France with my girlfriend tomorrow afternoon until the 15th, and I wanted to share the sweet taste of active pinyin before that. I'll be out of touch while hiking around, but George and Scott will be here cooking up more practice pizzas for y'all.

After I get back and upgrade this pupker, a similar mode for Japanese reading practice will follow, which should be a lot easier.

Oh, by the way: also on the practice page settings, there's now a "Use Wacom plugin" option. If you have a Wacom tablet, you can activate pressure-sensitive drawing there. I haven't used it to affect the recognition yet, but the squig drawing looks cooler. If you have the tip feel set to max softness, it will max out easily and draw really big. I set mine two notches down and it works better.

Payment System Up; What's Next

2010-03-02T09:51:00.000-05:00

Just uploaded the new payment system! As we said, existing users will still be able to purchase at the old prices until March 26th. Interestingly, the two year purchase has become abnormally popular lately...

I've been spending quite a bit of time going over and testing everything that was shuffled around: user referrals, coupons, school validations, and alike, both with the old system and the new. I've been very careful with this, and I'll be keeping an extra careful eye on the payment system to make sure it's working correctly. One thing that can be sure though: while credit card information is being transferred through us to our credit card payment gateway service provider, Authorize.Net, that information is encrypted the whole way.

And now that we have a credit card system in place, I can work on setting up a Wacom tablet store. These tablets are perfect for use for Skritter; we use them ourselves and time and again users have let us know how good they are for practicing. This should be fairly quick to build, so you won't have to wait much longer!

After that I'll be diving into a very large project indeed: the rebuilding of the vocab system from the ground up. I'll be starting by creating a practice navigation page, which you will reach by clicking the practice tab, rather than immediately going to a practice page. On this new page you will be able to:

Study all your vocab (currently how it works)
Study a single list by itself.
Study a single section of a list by itself.
Study a set of words entered in a textbox.
Browse all lists and sections studied, ordered by activity.
Remove a list from study, without removing words that have been added from other lists that you are still studying.

We get a lot of emails about the vocabulary list system. It's confusing how checking lists for study only changes whether words are added or not, and keeps words that have been added in study. By having users choose whether they want to study all the words they've added or a list or a section, it should be much clearer what they have chosen to study. It will also be simpler to remove words from study.

With these changes, cram mode will be phased out. Having two different kinds of lists, normal and cram, is confusing. So we're switching to having just one kind of list, and making it easy to study that list or a section in that list by itself, and being able to drop in a set of words on the fly to study. This should cover the same needs the current cram system covers, and will be much clearer and easier to use.

There are two more parts to the vocab overhaul: remaking the list editor and vastly upgrading the queue. With all these come new features and significant improvements in usability, so we hope you like these upcoming changes!

Credit Cards, Pricing Changes

2010-02-26T16:37:00.006-05:00

We have decided to change our prices and pricing infrastructure in 1 month's time. Starting on March 26th, Skritter will cost $9.95/mo, you will no longer be able to purchase multiple months of Skritter service, and billing will be done only via credit cards on a month-to-month basis.

If you are currently a paid user, this change in prices will only affect you when your subscription expires (e.g. if your account expires in June 2010, you will only be migrated to the new system in June). Between now and the 26th of March, existing users will still be able to buy Skritter through the old 1, 3, 6, 12, and 24 month Paypal/Google Checkout payment system, but we are migrating away from the old system and so new registering users won't have access to those payment options. If you want to continue paying with Paypal or Google Checking after March 26th, you will be able to pay for a 1 year subscription at the monthly rate.

The free trial will still be 2 weeks long, but we will require billing information during registration like Netflix, 37 Signals' Basecamp, and World of Warcraft. Because we realize that auto billing can sometimes catch people unaware, we are continuing our 100% refund policy and we will email new users 5 days and then again 1 day prior to being billed.

We are discontinuing the use of discount coupons, so if you have such a coupon, the code on it will cease to function in 30 days. We will continue to use coupons for institutional sales, but end user coupon discounts will cease functioning.

Institutional rates will be unaffected by these changes. To date we have done our institutional pricing separately from individual pricing, and it will continue to be done that way.

There are three big reasons we are changing the billing and pricing system:

1) To increase ease of use and simplify the signup process We've done a lot of one-on-one usability testing, and many of the testers had difficulty understanding how much Skritter cost at a glance which led a significant number of them to believe Skritter was significantly more expensive than it really is.

2) To satisfy prospective customers People keep telling us they don't like Paypal and Google Checkout. Since we launched we have heard from quite a few people who wanted to pay but didn't want to use or didn't understand Paypal and Google Checkout.

3) To satisfy existing customers Among current users, most would prefer to just use a credit card. We have been gathering data using the homepage poll about how many people want to continue paying with Google Checkout and Paypal (with and without existing balances). The results are clear: you would rather use your credit card without a third party service.

Since this is the first time we have made a big change in service, we wanted to give everyone one month's time before making the changes. If you have more questions or would like any clarifications, drop us a line and we'll do our best to help out.

Welcome Christopher and Gabriel!

2010-02-25T11:41:00.003-05:00

A while back we indicated that we were in the market some folks to help us do some back end vocabulary linguistics work. We received quite a few applications from a number of really qualified Skritterers. Regrettably we only had two positions to fill, but we are pleased to announce two new additions to the Skritter team: say hello to Christopher Clark and Gabriel Castillo! Christopher (username cclark) will be handling our character, definition, and stroke order corrections, so be sure to say hi when you send your next correction. Gabriel will be hard at work processing all the words you have added and making sure they are available for practicing as soon as possible.

In the last month or so we've fallen behind on adding vocabulary, responding to corrections, and processing vocabulary requests so we are thankful to have these two brave linguistic soldiers helping us dig out of the backlog!

Skritter.cn, MDBG Promotion, and More

2010-02-23T23:16:00.004-05:00

Here are Skritter HQ things have been particularly busy the last week or so, and we come to you bearing the fruits of our labors! We now have a Chinese mirror for those of you located behind the Great Firewall (www.skritter.cn), our promotion with MDBG has been announced, our February newsletter went out, and we've made a number of tweaks around the site.

Many of you have been having trouble with blocked content, general slowness, and 500 server errors from China. We've been trying to tweak things for a long time, but a few weeks ago we gave up and decided to just start a mirror of the site to speed up performance and eliminate access problems for those of you access Skritter from 中国. Our preliminary tests seem to indicate that it's a big improvement, but you be the judge, check out Skritter at www.skritter.cn and let us know how that works!

As some of you may have heard, we have been working with the Chinese dictionary MDBG for a little while testing some cross-functionality. On Sunday, we officially announced the launch (you can read the MDBG press release here). The promotion lets anyone add vocabulary from MDBG to their Skritter Queue directly without any copying and pasting. So, the next time you're browsing MDBG and find a character you'd like to learn, just click on the little "S" icon and you can get your Skritter learn on when it's convenient. We'd like to thank MDBG for being willing to make this happen. We've been fans of the dictionary for a long time (I've used it extensively for my Chinese homework) and we're happy to be working together.

Our February newsletter went out a little late in the early morning (EST) of February 16th. For those of you who didn't get it, you can check it out online here. It includes an interview with a new Skritterer, site updates, coming features, and the site stats from the last month. The January contest is going to be concluding shortly, and we'll be including news of the winners in next month's newsletter as well as a new feature: a pro tour of some of Skritter's less well understood features.

If you were effected, the list creation debacle has ended, and editing is now back to normal. We lost several of our own lists in the bug, and we appreciate how understanding everyone has been. Everything is back to normal and will remain thus.

Nick has created a bookmark that enables you to add words on any page to your Skritter Queue. The "Bookmarklet" as Nick christened it, can be accessed from the the bottom of the vocabulary page. It currently doesn't have an icon (okay, that's my bad), but it seems to be working well. Let us know what you think of that.

We posted on the forum a little while ago looking for some linguistic help, and we are going to be posting our hiring decision shortly. There are other big changes that need announcing soon, but that's for another blog post.

Skritter Referrals

2010-02-12T13:58:00.004-05:00

The Skritter referral system is up and running. You can go directly to the referral page by clicking here or by clicking on the "Tell your friends about us!" link on your homepage.

Here's how it works: refer your friends to Skritter and for every person you refer that becomes a paying member of the site, you get 2 free weeks of Skritter access. People you refer and who pay also get 2 extra weeks of time on their account. It's supposed to be a win-win for both people recommending Skritter and people just discovering the site. Let us know what you think of it!

In other news, we are preparing for this month's newsletter (which goes out on Monday), Nick and Scott have crushed still more bugs, and the alpha version of active reading practice has proven to be a little buggy.

Skritter Twitter

2010-02-07T18:55:00.005-05:00

Skritter is now on Twitter: you should follow us at SkritterHQ! The feed will keep you up to date on our goings on, and in the next few weeks we will be starting Twitter-only contests. More on that later, but for now, feel free to listen to our Twitterings and see what we're doing between blog posts.

In other news, the tee shirts for last month's contest winners arrived this last Tuesday and I was busy for a day or so packing and shipping them all over the world. Congrats to everyone who qualified for that! We hope that you get ample opportunity to amaze and astound your friends with your hard-won Skritter apparel. This month's newsletter contest continues on till the end of the month so that we can better feature winners in next month's installment.

Nick and Scott have been destroying bugs like rampaging, angry rhinoceroses in a field full of flightless flamingos. Scott fixed a problem with the manual move to next section feature. When you are manually moving through words you will no longer get the next section's material before you actually study it. Nick squashed a sly little bug that caused prompts to be skipped if users pressed the arrow button while the next prompt was loading. Contrary to previous behavior, the section progress bar that drops down in the flash now only appears when a new word is being studied, and it's a lot less of a performance drag (nice). Nick fixed the show button so that it now unpresses when the phantom fades out, as opposed to just staying depressed until its next usage. Nick also fixed a bug with manually adding words so that those words actually show up right away when you press the button. Scott fixed a problem that was forcing people to learn Chinese if they logged in via Clickpass.

Between all of this flamingo/bug stompin, Scott has been hacking away at a new Japanese textbook that will be up soon, Nick has been working on reading practice, and I've been doing a lot of customer support. Into the next week, and beyond!

Japanese Launch

2010-01-30T12:25:00.005-05:00

Today as promised Japanese has officially launched! We've gotten several more textbooks and JLPT lists up since we first started Japanese, and we've been tweaking and improving it all around as well. There's always more we'll be doing to make it better and better, but having used it myself for months I believe it's well and ready to go and start being charged for. We hope you'll find it useful enough to justify our monthly fee!

The reading and definition practice help complete the Japanese learning process in particular, letting you practice words even if you don't need to learn the kanji for them, which is very common in the first years of study. The reading and definition practices are fast and efficient, and promote active learning as well. So in addition to launching Japanese, we have taken reading and definition practice out of beta and alpha. New users now have both on by default, so they come in learning all aspects of their vocabulary.

Thanks also to all the beta testers for Japanese. We've been getting lots of good feedback and ideas on how to make it better. We have plenty of things on the docket to test out; unfortunately time is always the scarcest resource here. But we'll get to them in time. Thanks for all your support!

Also, if you want to study both languages, there's no extra cost for doing so. Just for you ambitious learn-all-Asian-languages folks out there.

Now go learn some kanji.

Sounds, Demo

2010-01-25T20:40:00.001-05:00

Just uploaded two new bits to the site. The first is sound effects! Blair has been working on these for the last few days. I've been so bold as to enable them by default, so please let us know what you think, which ones you like and dislike, and what other sounds you might like to hear. There are some sound effects depending on how long you practice, and there might be more later. (Update: you can turn them off in the practice page settings.)

The other is the first version of a new demo / tutorial to help new users figure out how to use Skritter and what it's all about. You can give it a shot, too. This one is very overdue.

Huge Amount of Newness

2010-01-21T18:12:00.009-05:00

Things around the Skritter base are humming with activity. Blair and Garrett are mauling through assignments like hungry bears looking for kidsnacks in the woods. So here's what's new:

Changing the Challenge Reward If you've been on the homepage recently you might have noticed that the challenge reward we offered in our newsletter (the custom-made avatars) apparently doesn't motivate learning as well as other prizes, so we're going to let the winners of this month's contest pick their prize from amongst the higher-scoring categories. You can either have a t-shirt, mug, or water bottle (all emblazoned with a cute Skritter of course)! So, work towards your studying goal with the knowledge that if you win, you can pick a prize that you'll actually want.

New Front Page Video Way back in the day, we had a sort of front page teaser for Skritter. It had explosions, it had footage of writing, and it was phased out with our new front page, but we have created another one. Sadly, this one lacks explosions, but we hope it will interest people none the less. If you'd like to view it you'll have to check it out on youtube since it's hooked up the Google A/B testing and so may or may not show up for you. Let us know what you think so that we can improve!

Sign up/Sign in Pages Redesigned The sign up fields in the top right of the screen are just the tip of a bigger sign up interface overhaul. You can check out the new sign up page here. Say thanks to Garrett for that sweet implementation.

Tone Colors in the Flash Blair has fixed readings that appear in the flash during definition practice so that if you have the tone colors enabled, the colors now appear consistently in all instances of the reading. Nice work on that Blair.

Memory Leak Plugged Nick has fixed a large memory leak that caused the flash app to gradually eat up more and more memory and have performance problems. The problem would be most apparent if you left the practice page running for long periods of time or practiced like a maniac for 5 hours straight. So now you addicts will have a much better user experience into the 6th hour!

Language Switcher I just want to point out that I definitely called the controversy over the Chinese/Japanese flag language switcher. The ability to change languages back and forth anywhere on the site is nice, but I said, "Do you think anybody will mind the Chinese flag?" to which everyone just poo-pooed me. Ha! Well, now it's fixed and you can switch languages, but it did cause a stir. If you don't like the zh/ja switcher, hit the forums.

We're currently working on a demo for the front-facing parts of the site, after which we're starting in on a revamping of the pricing system. So for now, fare thee well, and by all means let us know through comments here and through the feedback system what you think of all these changes.

Passwords and Autocomplete

2010-01-19T14:53:00.002-05:00

Hey all, minor note. We've changed the way logging in works for security and speed purposes, but it might break some of your guys' autocompleted passwords. Basically for all browsers except Firefox (because of the way different browsers store passwords), you'll have to retype in your password and let your browser store the new version for it to work.

This change in the login system also means for users who haven't logged in since September and who don't use clickpass, their password will no longer work at all, retyped in or not. This shouldn't be a problem for the vast majority of users, but if you want to get back to your account, you can use the recovery feature to get back in, and if you still have trouble let us know and we'll be glad to help you out.

That is all!

Newsletter, T-Shirt Winners, Forum Emails

2010-01-15T17:49:00.004-05:00

The Skritter January Newsletter has just gone out! If you aren't subscribed and want to be, or vice versa, you can change your email settings. We'll be emailing the 43 T-shirt winners tomorrow. (43!)

The other night, I built a feature that has been waiting a while: watched forum topics. You can now click on the little envelope at the top right of a forum topic and get emailed whenever someone replies. The current icon is extremely great because icon-man George was sleeping when I built this. Perhaps now he will notice and replace it with something a bit bigger and more modern.

Another long overdue feature: if the word you're adding to the Skritter database is made up of characters which usually only have one pronunciation, then the pinyin for that word will be autofilled in the add-word widget. Sorry this took so long!

I've also tweaked the tone and grade buttons to make them more glassy, so that if a character pokes under them, you can still see it. Looks pretty cool to me, but there is disagreement in the base, so your thoughts are invited.

Hidden Readings, Progress Bars

2010-01-12T19:47:00.005-05:00

Today, we uploaded two new features. One is a new prompt mode for writing prompts, where the reading (pinyin or kana) is hidden at first. This lets you key off the definition (and sometimes sound) instead of using the reading as a crutch. It's still experimental, so try it out, let us know what works, and think of ways it could work better for you. We used to call this "audio-only prompts", but when we realized that only a few prompts would be able to use it if you limited it to words where you could prompt with just the audio, we decided "hide readings" is a better name. You can enable it on the practice page settings menu.

The other is the addition of a dropdown progress bar in the Flash, so when a word is added, you can see what list and section it's coming from. It also shows you your progress through that section. Blair, one of our January interns, put this one together. As she quickly learns ActionScript, I wonder what I'll have her work on next--a voice recognition module perhaps? Antimatter?

We've made some other fixes, too, including reading/definition font fixes (let us know if there are still problems), transparent tone and grade buttons for less obscurity, proper forum RSS topic post selection, and more. There are still some unresolved bugs creeping around out there, but I'm after 'em like a toddler in a jewelry store.

JLPT 2,3 and 4 Are Up

2010-01-11T16:58:00.002-05:00

I've just uploaded a new set of vocabulary to study: the Japanese Language Proficiency Test Lists! These are the Japanese version of the HSK lists, except the numbers are reversed (4, most basic, 1, most difficult). I've got the JLPT 1 list, but there are still some things to hammer out with it, so I'll save that for later, but it will come.

The lists have been ordered with the same algorithm created by Nick for sorting the HSK lists, which sorts based on frequency of usage and on their placement in textbooks. There are a few things I'll want to tweak with the sorting algorithm next time, when the next set of tests come out. They're reorganizing them into five levels instead of four, and we'll aim to have these new lists up on our site soon after they are finished, with upgraded sorting.

And finally, thanks to Michael Hominick at renshuu.org for providing these lists! We agreed to trade some of our lists so he has some more textbooks and I have these proficiency lists to save both of us some work. He also provided me with Kanji Kentei lists, which I will get to as soon as time allows! For now though, there are many pressing upgrades and features that need to get done, so I'm leaving some of this list making for later on. Never nothing to do here at Skritter headquarters, that's for sure.

A New Look and more Detail

2010-01-07T19:45:00.003-05:00

Well, as you might have noticed, we've changed the look of the site. Several of you had mentioned that the grey background looked a little ... Atari circa 1989 ... desktop computer circa 1994 ... Netscape circa 1996 ... IBM, forever. So Chloe, our design consultant and aesthetic prognosticator, came up with a rad new design that you now see before you. Okay, yes, all we did was change the background color, add a gradient, and switch out the tabs for rounder versions. That said, I have to say that I'm darned impressed at how well it all came together. If you have thought or further suggestions, you should let us know.

In addition, reading and definition practice now has a little more style, and the prompts display more information. This is particularly evident in Japanese practice, which now shows the writing in the prompt where once there was only blankness.

Let me pause for a moment and note that both the new look and the prompt improvements were implemented by our very productive interns. Whoa, they've only been working with us for about 2 days, and they have already contributed to the site. So let's hear it for Blair and Garrett! They're rocking hard.

Current projects we're working on include this month's newsletter, a new login interface, and >finally< a tutorial to help people that are new to the site.

Here's a visualization of today's accomplishments:

We're Back!

2010-01-05T18:47:00.003-05:00

Well actually, we've been back for a few days, but Scott returned earlier this afternoon, which means that the trifecta is complete and we can resume operating at full tilt.

Two updates from the Skritter HQ:

1) Our records show that a surprising number of people have taken us up on last month's practice-every-day challenge, and we will be sending out an email to alert everyone that qualifies at the end of the week. The T-shirts are ready and waitin' to be thrown out the hungry horde!

2) We have two interns that are helping us around the site for the duration of Oberlin's Winter Term (essentially the month of January). Today Garrett implemented a long-overdue site update that will go live shortly. Tomorrow Blair will get oriented and she can start sinking her teeth into the actionscript tome that is the practice page. Thanks to those noble souls for their assistance, and we look forward to giving them ample opportunity to impress everyone with their skillz.

新年快乐!

And ... we're out (for the holidays)

2009-12-21T15:41:00.004-05:00

Just to let everyone know, the Skritter team is about to leave the building for our homes, hearths, and eggnog. Nick left for home yesterday, Scott left earlier today, and I'm out of here tomorrow. I'm going to finish up responding to a few more emails and bug reports, but then you're on your own for a week until Nick returns on the 31st. I'll be checking my email sporadically throughout the festivities, but most things will have to wait until after I get back and get into the zone.

So from the Skritter team, thanks a lot for a wonderful 2009, and we look forward to making 2010 even awesome-er-ester.

Tagline Winners!

2009-12-18T20:02:00.004-05:00

As promised, we have made our determination for the Skritter tagline, and the winner was actually submitted by two users:

Emily Imhoff
Alex Blackwelder

Both of them receive 2 years of free Skritter time for their submission (how did you guys actually submit the same thing?):

"The Write Way to Learn Chinese/Japanese"

In total, we received 72 suggestions from more than a dozen users, which made the selection pretty difficult. It took more than an hour of arguing to decide on the one we chose, and even then we've decided to mod it slightly. Since the original tagline didn't include a reference to Japanese we're adding that, but it's going to be language specific. Only one language will appear for logged-in users, so if you're studying Chinese, the tagline will read "The Write Way to Learn Chinese/Japanese," if you're studying Japanese, you'll see that instead.

Thanks a lot to everyone for their submissions. We will probably wait to mod the logo to include the tagline until after the holidays since we're so busy right now, but soon everyone will see its glory!

First Newsletter! Thoughts?

2009-12-15T18:01:00.006-05:00

We just sent out the first ever Skritter newsletter! In this issue we included a summary of last month's work, coming features, a short interview with one of our first ever involved users, thinkbuddha, news about a Chinese learning challenge we're sponsoring, and site statistics. If you got it and read it, we would be really interested to know your thoughts. Since this is our first attempt, we didn't know if it was too long, too short, if we were missing information, or if people would even read it at all. So please do let us know what you think, and yell at us here. Your feedback will help us improve next month's version.

Yookoso!

2009-12-15T16:36:00.004-05:00

Some more textbooks for you Japanese students! I just uploaded Yookoso!: An Invitation to Contemporary Japanese, and Yookoso!: Continuing with Contemporary Japanese. These are beginner textbooks like Genki and Nakama, so we have a fair number of lists for newcomers to the language. These books are also a good source of topical vocabulary, such as vocabulary for hobbies, travel, health, and nature.

On the docket: Adventures in Japanese 1-3, Basic Kanji Books 1 and 2, Kanji Kentei, JLPT, and Minna No Nihongo.

I've been doing so much reading and definition practice for my Japanese. Whoa, isn't it great?

Definition (and Reading) Practice

2009-12-11T14:00:00.004-05:00

As many of you have noticed, definition practice has been added! We put it up a few days ago and have been ironing out some of the bugs. It's still in testing but if you're feeling adventurous go to the language settings page or open the settings lightbox in the practice page to turn it on.

Some things to know if you use definition practice:

The definition practice is not immediately turned on for your existing words. They're only added when you add new words. If you want to study definitions from a list you've already been adding from, you'll have to go to that list and turn it on from where you want definitions added. It works the same as it would if you hadn't been studying tones and now turned them on.

There's currently no way to view your progress with definitions. We're going to have to redesign the progress page a bit to accommodate all the new data. But don't worry, we're keeping track of it all in the backend.

Sometimes you'll need to refresh your practice page to study all parts of a word. When a word needs to be studied in multiple parts, such as when you add both the definition and the writing, the part that doesn't get studied immediately will not be studied until the page is refreshed. There's supposed to be space between studying the different parts of the word anyway, so it shouldn't be a big deal.

Also, right now definition practice works like a flashcard; we show you the word and then you click to see the definition and grade yourself. We've been planning to do active definition practice, where you type in the definition of the word and Flash magically grades it taking into account things like synonyms and misspellings, but on first blush this kind of definition practice may turn out to be good enough, or better than what we originally planned. It's faster than typing out the definitions, for sure, and saves us development time. Let us know what you think of its efficacy.

As for reading practice, it's been enabled for Japanese! Everything I said about definition practice applies to reading practice, except that we're still very much intent on making it so that you type in the pinyin or reading eventually. Nick tells me it would take too much time to set up the Chinese with flash card style reading practice, so instead he's going to skip that and go straight to active typing Chinese reading practice. We're aiming to get that up next month.

We're very excited to finally get to this point! We've been doing all sorts of backend work to support reading and definition practice for about the last half year, I'd say, so hope you guys enjoy it. Now that I can study my definitions and readings, I can thoroughly learn my Japanese textbooks... better get started.

New Practice Interface

2009-12-07T16:40:00.022-05:00

For the past year, and some odd months, the practice page had remained largely the same. Every time you would go to practice, you would be greeted by the following screen:

It was great, but it quickly became outdated. We kept tacking on features until it became obvious that to accommodate the next few features, we'd have to put menus inside menus and tabs on tabs on tabs. So we created a new one, one with which many of you are now familiar. But today marks a milestone, the old practice page is no longer going to be accessible as of later tonight, so here's the new design, and a few of the things that we changed:

So here are some of the big changes:

The Toolbar

On the old toolbar, the "show" button was represented by the character 示. On the new one, we tried to make it more apparent what the button would do by making the icon a "?." By popular demand, we added a back button so that if you ever accidentally proceed forwards too quickly, you can always go back and complete items.

You might notice that the "undo" button no longer exists although you can still press "z" to use it. The undo button has actually been obsolete since about this time last year. We attended the ACTFL last year when Skritter was new and the strokes didn't auto-snap. The undo button was built mainly to allow users to correct their mis-recognized strokes and remove out-of-order strokes. Through UX testing and the addition of stroke level snapping, the undo became obsolete, which is good, because we needed the room on the toolbar for the new "Back" button!

Better Lookup and Vocabulary Controls

Many people have requested that we let make it easy for people to look up vocabulary on external sites. Well, now you can choose from six Chinese or five Japanese dictionaries. This window also gives you the ability to see from where items come.

You can also delete individual words without going to the vocabulary page for that list. Finally, if a prompt has an item not currently in your review list, you can add that item from within this menu by clicking on the "+" button. In this example, I had added the word, but not its component characters.

Improved List Management

The removal of the active list area at the bottom of the old practice page made it necessary to relocate the active list display. But we didn't just move it, we consolidated the practice settings page, making it easier to figure out where you need to go to change your vocabulary options.

We've also changed how you let Skritter add items for you to study. Now you can choose to either let Skritter manage the adding itself (Automatic), or you can pause all lists and add words manually (Manual) using the green "+" button.

You'll notice that there's also a link to the vocabulary page. When we were UX testing, a lot of people thought they should control vocabulary from the practice page. Since it's currently infeasible for that to occur, we thought we'd try and point new Skritter users in the right direction.

Succinct Settings

We wanted the options for the practice page to be accessible on the same page as the functions they affect. On the old practice page, to change your flash window size, you had to navigate to account>practice settings, save, and navigate back. Now the same change requires three clicks and one page load as opposed to five clicks and two page loads.

The new settings menu also lets you activate tone colors, grading buttons, and allows you specify how quickly characters are animated. The tone colors option is new, and serves as just another way to aid memory. It changes the color of the pinyin in the prompt to correspond to a color so that you can remember that shāngdiàn is red, then blue.

The grading buttons give you greater control over how Skritter schedules reviews for you. The buttons are based on the Anki self-grading system. If you want to make sure Skritter knows exactly how well you know a prompt, turn this option on and never over-review an item again.

Finally, setting the animation speed governs how quickly characters are revealed when you hold down the show button. If you only want to know the next two strokes of a character, but don't want to see the entire thing, set the speed low and hold down the "show" button for a second. This will force yourself to remember more with less prompting.

The settings menu is going to be expanding in the future as we complete more features, so look for this one to grow with time.

Cram and Scratchpad

Both the cram mode and the scratchpad have been made into options that are accessible through the all-powerful practice page. Because Cram mode was essentially just practicing a small subset of your items to review, and the scratchpad did the same thing but didn't record progress, we decided the two modes were more conducive to existing side by side with the regular practice page. As such, you can simply change the behavior of the practice page to act like the cram and scratchpad now.

Dfor now you can still get to the old scratchpad by going to www.skritter.com/scratchpad.

Conclusion

This update has been a long time in coming, and we're very excited to finally make the transition to our shiny new interface. Let us know if you find anything wrong with it, or you would like to suggest improvements!