I have just stumbled over Skritter and I really love the concept, but unfortunately I am one of those damn people clamoring for Cantonese support. I know you don't have any plans as per the FAQ, but there really is nothing comparable out there for Cantonese - and us Cantonese learners are pretty much stumped.

However, I think there would be a very simple solution for this - why can't users simply add custom romanization / translation? Since you already support traditional characters, all that would be necessary is for the user to enter the Chinese character (so the system recognizes the correct writing pattern to follow) and a custom romanization / translation. This seems like fairly simple functionality and would tie in very simply with what's already in place.

Look I really love Skritter and I would give you guys all my money, and there's a lot of Canto students who would love something like this. Thoughts?

By coincidence, I recently updated the FAQ entry (thanks for checking it!) to say this instead:

"We don't have Cantonese, but we are offering some limited support for an initiative to add Cantonese pronunciations in the definitions as an alternate site language. See this forum thread for details:
http://www.skritter.com/forum/topic?id=141140247

It's no substitute for real Cantonese support, but it might help a little."

So instead of customizing the readings, you customize the definitions. Is this what you were talking about?

Thanks, that looks like what I need - but could you explain how it would work in practice? I guess I'll be signing up for a month to check it out - as long as there is some sort of custom field to add Jyutping romanizations, that would be enough.

...or not, as it seems you don't accept PayPal :/ Well, I'll try to get a credit card in the next few weeks.

You can use paypal! You just have to pre-pay instead of a direct debit :)

Can you let me know how it works exactly? I don't see any mention of Paypal in the regular sign up process. Thanks!

In practice, you'd study as normal on the site for the most part. You'd set your source language to English/Cantonese using the dropdown in the upper right. Then as you either chose vocabulary lists or studied, you'd click on the definitions, add the Jyutping to the definition, and check the "share as correction" box.

For PayPal, it's a bit inconvenient, but it can be done. See this link: http://www.skritter.com/faq#prepay

After your one-week trial, if you still want more time to check it out and aren't ready to do the six months, email us and we'll get you sorted out.

@Paypal
But how can you even do the trial without a credit card?

I'm asking partly out of curiosity and partly because a good friend of mine wants to give skritter a go, but the need for a credit card to do even just the trial is a huge disincentive for her.

You use the coupon SKRITPREPAY when signing up instead of putting in your credit card number.

Just out of curiosity, what is it that makes the full support of Cantonese so difficult? It seems to me like it would be pretty straightforward to make the transition from Mandarin to Cantonese; certainly more than supporting Japanese. But then again, I know nothing about Cantonese.

Sure, it's a lot easier than supporting Japanese. It's still many thousands of lines of code that would need to be changed to be made aware of a third language, and a lot of content to add, or to shepherd the crowdsourcing of. If we had many more resources, we might--but the market demand is very low.