on loading up scratchpad, there are two words that are there, ni hao and something else.

I just want to doodle and do random words, how to I reset the scratchpad to do this?

You have to add the words that you want to practice.

is there anyway to do that in chinese charachters?

OK, so it says that u have to add them in Chinese charachters but how do you do that? Do I have to copy and paste them ? ????

Is there anyway to draw them on the pad and have the system recognise them???

Basically I have a long list of Chinese characters on a peice of paper which I need to learn for my class, I don't have pinyin or english for them :_))))

Thanks for your help
:-)

Hmm, if you don't know the pinyin or English of the words, you'll have to use a dictionary-style handwriting recognizer to look them up first. Our handwriting recognition is built to give feedback about whether you're doing a character correctly instead of figuring out what character you're trying to draw.

Both http://usa.mdbg.net/chindict/chindict.php (MDBG) and http://www.nciku.com/ (nciku) have this kind of handwriting recognizer. Once you input the words and get their characters, you can then save them somewhere, put them into the scratchpad, put them into your queue, make a custom list or a cram list from them, etc.

Does this answer your question? If you have trouble looking up the words in those dictionaries, you could email me (nick at skritter...) a photo of your paper and I can give you a list of the characters on it.

If you don't have pinyin or english for them, exactly what are you going to "learn"? Just to duplicate the drawing? Or is looking up the pinyin/English maybe a part of the exercise?

I would use NCIKU for the recognition. Very, very good recognizer.

nckiu is very good. However, if you're just getting started with characters it might be worthwhile to do it 'old-skool' by finding the radicals and stroke counts.

Lyons: I never could deal with those radical and stroke count dictionaries. In this digital age I wonder if learners really need to do that. What's the cost/benefit? I think it might make a lot of newbies tear their hair out and give up.

One benefit is to get a basic understanding of character compositions and "etymology" of a character.

I sometimes use NCIKU to look up a totally unknown character, but I almost always look up its meaning and components in Wenlin because of the nice browsability that Wenlin gives you.

Nicki: I found that learning how to look up characters according to radical/stroke count helped a lot in understanding their structure. That's the main benefit. Of course, it was tough to begin with but it got easier.

As you say, in this digital age it's probably not a necessary skill. It may well be that after writing enough characters one will get familiar with their structure anyway...

If I'm reading something online, I use Chinese Pera-kun to check characters I don't know. Otherwise, it's quicker to check a paper dictionary then turn on my computer!

At some point, you'll be able to learn structure really easily while you practice with Skritter, since we'll have component breakdowns built in. Man! That will rock. Then you'll need the radical lookup practice even less.