Hello all

I was looking at my stats and I noticed that the number of characters I learned to read significantly trails what I can write.

Character writings 266 --- Retention 74.6%
Character readings 149 --- Retention 83.5%

Skritter introduces how to write a character first, so I understand that there would be some sort of a gap, but why is it so large? I also wonder how I’m supposed to write a character before I can read it, or have ever seen it. I always initially tap the screen to see the strokes. Sometimes an odd situation occurs where a character looks familiar because I’ve written it a half dozen times, but I can’t read it.

This is not helpful because my Chinese Professor has frequent quizzes where we’re expected to be able to read the characters before we can write them. Ideally my reading would be 35 characters ahead, instead of 100+ characters behind.

I’m currently working through Integrated Chinese I – Third Edition. Any suggestions?

The gap due to doing writings first would be smaller if your retention rate were higher, since it doesn't introduce the reading until you've gotten the writing well enough to allow space for the reading to come in. You might want to try to raise the retention rate, particularly by looking at the character decompositions and making/using some mnemonics to help remember them better.

You could also try doing something with a remix of Integrated Chinese where the fork is set to readings only and you study that one by itself until you get far enough ahead of where your writings are at.

I'm taking your advice with the mnemonics and I'm using a remix list to catch up for now.

Thanks!