Hi guys,

I'm interested in your experiences. When I started using Skritter, I just used it with default settings, and started with the Skritter 101 Chinese.

In this setting, characters in words are not added automatically. I noticed this setting, and thought it would be a good idea to know the character definitions too, so I turned this on.

I've used it for about six months this way, but find it gets very confusing when a word contains a new character that has a similar, but slightly different meaning, or when the character have a variety of meanings and the word has a variety of other meanings. It's worse when some lists group similar words together.

So to deal with this, I decided to take charge of the order words appear in. I building my own lists that mix new characters in with words that are made up of characters I already know, and then a week later add a word with the new character. This has work much better, and I was able to increase the number of new words per day quite a bit.

But I'm wondering if I shouldn't be doing this the other way around, i.e., turn off the auto character add feature, add words with new characters first - maybe two or three with the same character - and then add the character a week or two later.

Ultimately the aim is to broaden my vocabulary as quickly as possible, and increase my character knowledge, but with with the former taking much higher priority.

Your thoughts?

I agree with you that it is useful to add compound words when learning the individual characters, though I'm not as systematic as you, I usually only add other words with the character when I'm having trouble remembering it.

I've had the setting of adding all characters in words enabled all along, so I have nothing to compare with. I guess it depends on which approach you prefer when learning. Either learning the spoken language first and only learning the writing when you know the pronounciation and meaning of a word, or the analytic character approach – by learning components, then characters, then words (maybe with some kind of Heisig method, involving lots of mnemonics).

For me I think it's a mixture of the two approaches that works best. I think it's much easier to learn new words with lots of exposure (as opposed to systematically learning character by character with mnemonics). But I've already put a lot of time into learning components and basic charcters.

So my recommendation for broadening your vocabulary as quickly as possible is to actually spend less time on systematically learning characters – and more time on reading and listening. In addition, I would suggest that you learn the most common phonetic components if you don't already know them.

I definitely agree with broadening vocabulary through reading and listening. Even though I am guilty of relying too much on Skritter and not enough on words in context, you will learn a word so much more effectively in context.

Just recently I had a word that I could not remember for the life of me... It would come up in my reviews several times a day, and I couldn't remember it for about a week. Then, I saw it in just one context, and suddenly, it was noticeably more secure. Not fully learned, but I could finally tell Skritter I knew the word.

Thanks for the comments. Just to be clear, I'm not using Skritter only - in fact, it makes up about half of my study time, sometimes less.

While I do want to learn to speak and understand spoken Mandarin (in fact, that's quite urgent now since I'll be in China for two months later this year), the aim has always been to become literate.

I'm just trying to find a good balance between learning words that I will utilmately use and learning definitions for characters that are never used as a word on their own. While I think it is important to know these, I do find them to be an enormous time suck.

I've switched to not adding characters for about two weeks now, and I've found that I still get to know the characters, because as part of a word, I still learn to write them, write the pinyin, and know the tone. The only part I'm not learning is the definition, and that becomes apparent after a few words.

Thanks.