Hi,

I would like to share with you my teacher's opinion on skritter.

I am now living in China and studying chinese here and I do find skritter really useful to learn characters and complementary to my chinese lessons.

My teacher seemed not very happy when I showed her the website.

did you have a similar experience?

Personally, I think it's just that she maybe feel these kind of tools could be a competitor. I think her view is totally wrong and that she should even help me to use skritter as a learning tool.

Of course, I am going to continue using skritter, but I was wondering if my teacher my have a reasonable point in his negative view about skritter.

Keep the strokes going!

Luis

What, specifically, did your teacher say? If she has any critiques, I would like to hear them!

James

Sounds like you just moved to China?

If so, get ready for learning the 'other half' of the chinese language - not the words themselves but how they are really used and how they fit into the context of the culture.

There will be all sorts of things you can't explain! But at the end of the day - let her think what she wants to think, don't make her lose face over it. You know for yourself how useful Skritter is!

Hey Luisonte, we would be really interested to know the details as well! :)

We've attended a number of conferences and some 老师 just seem to be averse to technology. I had a pretty humorous encounter with one older teacher who approached our booth. We were using a laptop and projector to play a screencast of us using Skritter on the back wall of our booth. She approached hesitantly, looking at the screen cast. She made eye contact with me, took a brief look around the booth and spotted the laptop and recoiled as though I might cause her physical harm. She then hurried away saying "I don't like computers!"

It was one of the more bizarre encounters I've had with Chinese teachers, but there definitely seems to be a reticence among middle aged 老师 against computers and software.

For comparison, at the same conference, almost every younger 中国的老师 we spoke to was really enthusiastic!

Hi,

She basically said learning characters is non use for a foreigner, like if she was used to students just learning pinyin and oral Chinese. (I think most, probaly 90% of foreigners give up trying to study hanzi and so, maybe chinese teachers believe starting up the hanzi mountain is a way of getting one more person to the burnout).

On the other hand, she asked me to write and recognize some characters. The truth is that my recognition reading a text was really impresive compared with most foreigners around (even my level compared to most of you here is quite low).

She, then, said something in my stroke order (which I think was quite acceptable).

It's not that I started studying chinese yesterday. I have been more or less studying seriously for 3 years with two one-month intensive summer programs during my holidays and I am married to a Chinese (typical profile in skritter, by the way).

The point is that, after years and many hours of study, I reached the conclusion that my solid learning of chinese is when I also know how to read (and, less, write). I am an adult and I know what motivates me and what works for me.
I can understand that it does not operate the same way for different persons and mindests, but, for me, learning chinese just with pinyin is not a strong method.

And, finally, learning characters is really hard at the begining but gets easier with the time.

Well, I think I know what works for me, or, if I am wrong, at least I am wrong but motivated. If I am not motivated (because I follow a method I don't trust) I cannot really go on studying something that requires that much effort.

I doubt we can study chinese with our biggest motivation so I would advice everyone to follow the method that better helps them to keep happy about every day studying harder.

L

@Luisonte, I completely agree. As adults we have an advantage over children in that we are much more disciplined, and whatever we can do to help our own discipline will help us study. If you like movies, study movies; if you like rap music study rap music; if you like classical Chinese poetry study classical Chinese poetry. Whatever you need to do to get yourself to study every day is helpful.

Where are you from, by the way?

James

Hi James,

totally agree. I think now I am now much more conciouss about trying to get most of my time :) (because I am getting older!!!) And that is where a tool like skritter fits, I already tried many things before and I had hundreds of those little notebooks (which I still use, but less) that I ussally gave to my mather in law so she was also aware of my efforts :) :)

I am a Spanish now in Shanghai where I will be at least 2 years.

My environment to study chinese is not old fashioned cos I am suposed to be at the tob biz school here. I am suprised because my colleagues do not seem to know about skritter :)

L

Hi Luis,

I also speak Spanish (my wife is Venezuelan) and I hope that in the future Skritter will support adding definitions in multiple languages. Probably what it would need to do is add a tag to a custom definition saying what language it is in, and allow some way to share and search the alternative definitions.

Have you found any good Spanish-Chinese resources online?

James

Hi James,

spanish-chinese remains quite empty of resources for 2 reasons:
1. the market is not so big
2. most people learning chinese (spanish speaking), or learning spanish (chinese speaking) already got a good command of english to be used as a bridge language

That makes that people like me (even my English is far from perfect) can perfectly use english-chinese resources.

You can check this web that intends to be a spanish version of chinesepod (and their effort is to be valued) to see what is the difference in materials development at the moment:

http://www.chinoesfera.com/

I am totally opened to initatives in this field :)

Luis, that's a good technique, as you also get to practice your English skills while you practice your Chinese. However there are many times when you would like to be able to translate directly.

¿De que parte de España eres? Puedes enviarme email a jww1066 arroba gmail.com si prefieres eso...

James

When talking with teachers, I've never got any traction regarding Skritter. My guess is that they just feel there's a right "way" to learn Chinese, and it's to fill “米” books with line after line of characters. There's no awareness of the idea of spaced repetition.

My current teacher has asked to see my writing practice and I had to tell him I didn't have any, but whatever character from our text he can name, I can write it. He accepted it after he tried me out a few times :-)

better go on ANKI, it's for free !!

Most teachers I've had have been encouraging about learning to write characters, particularly teachers from older generations. I do agree that if your teacher is telling you not to write characters it's probably because she doesn't want you to get burned out like other students.

Chinese education tends to stick to pretty well-defined and traditional formula, and something "reliable" like rote repetition will generally win out over "fun" any day of the week. A quick trip to any Chinese bookstore's parenting section will give a hint as to why; there is a limitless supply of books with titles like 《3岁决定孩子的一生》《八年级决定孩子的未来》（these are real books) and so on. There's sort of an attitude of "Don't mess around with new stuff, because if it doesn't work out your kid is screwed for life", which then ends up as a "if it ain't broke don't fix it" sort of attitude towards education. Granted a lot of people are pointing out now that the education system is indeed broken, but that's another story.

So it's easy to understand that a lot of Chinese teachers, particularly those who have been teaching for many years, wouldn't be immediately thrilled about Skritter. I don't think any would feel that their profession is "threatened" by skritter since character memorization was never a big part of their job to begin with, it's something the student does on their own time.

Besides, there's no shortage of Western teachers and professors who are utterly ignorant when it comes to technological study tools - Anki is an excellent tool for just about any class, but when was the last time you had a professor tell you about Anki, or even spaced repetition in general? Operating powerpoint is about the limit for most professors I've had.

Actually, most Chinese teachers I've talked to about Skritter and alternative study methods, who I admit are all younger and grew up around technology, have been very receptive. Unfortunately since Skritter only comes in English, the teachers who work in schools have been unable to recommend it to any of their dozens of Japanese and Korean students (hint hint) but said they'd pass it along to their English-speaking students. Many teachers had already heard of spaced repetition. Don't forget that pretty much every Chinese person has had to struggle with studying English at some point and many many many Chinese students use SRS cards themselves.

I got to say, I've yet to meet any teacher that knows anything at all about advanced study tools. About the most they go is looking at Chinese stuff on youtube.

I can tell you from experience that teachers being resistant to technological innovation in pedagogy is not a uniquely Chinese phenomenon.

That said, there is probably also a tendency for technophiles to over-discount the "tried and true" methods. I actually would recommend that an absolute beginner student in writing Chinese should use Skritter sparingly and actually invest time in those dreadful "rote" workbook exercises. One reason is to get a better fine motor coordination in writing the characters the way they are supposed to look. Another is to more directly bridge the experience of using a real pen to write. Yet another is to ensure legibility in case you actually have to write something that someone else has to read.

None of these are meant as criticisms of Skritter, simply a suggestion that all methods be viewed as supportive elements, not as complete solutions. I completely agree with the comments above on motivation. At this point in my learning career if I had to rely on writing the same character over and over again without interruption I would give up.

Hrm well, I did the exact opposite. Before I draw anything on paper I skrittered like crazy until I could write a thousand characters including everything in the textbooks I needed.

My handwriting was atrociousness, proportions way off and the sort of thing you'd expect but this was comparatively rapid to fix up. Now I can get out a pad and pen and write a character I've never written on paper before and be pretty happy with how it turns out.

I am a non-Chinese person (white American) teaching Chinese in public school at the high school and middle school level. I began using Skritter scratchpad with my students last school year. I have requested full Skritter acounts for students for the next school year (2010-2011) and it has been approved.

Students began last school year writing only with paper and pen or pencil. When we started also incorporating Skritter scratchpad, I noticed that students with horrible handwriting in Chinese were writing much nicer looking characters.

Some students were more motivated to practice when using Skritter and some students (a minority) asked if they could just continue using paper and pencil. (I said 'yes'.)

I think that, besides just being a very practical and innovative tool for studying Chinese characters, Skritter sends young students the message that Chinese characters are part of their young, technically connected world.

That's great, Léi lǎoshī! If the scratchpad can do that, I hope the full Skritter accounts will really make a huge difference.

We had a bunch of high school kids testing out Skritter at an immersion program in Oberlin this month, and a bunch of Chinese teachers came. They all seemed to love Skritter, once they saw what it could do. One of them is at a school where all the kids are given tablet PCs. She is very excited, and I'm jealous. Where was my tablet PC with Skritter on it when I was in high school!

Where was my Chinese class? Where are the Chinese classes for public school students now? Yes, there are some but not many.

Wow, getting that approved by the school board in these days of tightwad high schools is pretty dang impressive.

Incidentally, how did you manage to get touch/pen input for an entire class to practice this year? Does the school already have tablets for the students or something?