I've been wanting to do something like this for years. Very slick javascript too. I'm impressed.

Not sure if I will pay for an account though, and I'm not sure that's the way to get rich off this idea. You would make a lot more money if you opened it up completely and added AdSense to rake in the advertising bucks like nciku does.

I wish you guys the best of luck.

Jeff

I think it's a fantastic service, and well worth paying for. Doubly so when we get definition/pinyin practice :p.

Thinking about it, it's about the only thing on the internet I do pay for.

And I'd rather not be bothered by ads when struggling to remember mnemonics!

We love free software as much or more as the next guy, but our guess is that the numbers wouldn't work out for ads for these reasons:

1) The number of page views is relatively small.
2) The purpose of the site isn't conducive to it--when you're on the practice page, you want to stay there and practice, not follow ad links.
3) We spend a relatively large amount of CPU per user serving all the characters and manipulating scheduling data. It's not enough to matter with subscriptions, but it is too expensive to support with ads.
4) We feel that if you're going to be spending hours per week on this, and it saves you a lot of time, then it's worth dollars per month.
5) Ads are gross.

Until we find a magic way to open source it and make it free while still making money, then, we'll have to settle for turning some people off with a for-pay service. People that really can't afford it can always get in touch with us to figure something out.

Have you considered adding a "lifetime subscription"?

No, but that's interesting. How much would you expect to pay for a lifetime subscription for it to be worthwhile?

Hopefully I'll have a job by the time i start classroom based lessons for Chinese in January...if i do i'll be subscribing for sure :D

I am more than happy to pay for this. When I started out learning Chinese I took evening classes for 2,5 years. Event though these are heavily subsidized in Belgium I ended up paying around 180 euro (250 USD) per year. It is probably ok to have classes like this. Probably we all need it in the beginning. But after a while I found that I needed extra material. Now I use only the internet for my Chinese studies: chinespod and now skritter. Works out at about the same as evening classes but with 10 (20?) times the resources. So it is money well spent.

Furthermore, I know this system (skritter) just works. I knew already a lot of characters, mut most of them in a passive way. Skritter has allowed me to activate this knowledge. And I find I have improved that area of my memory where I seem to store all these characters. Adding new ones now, is just so easy. I start to get a feel for this game. Thank you guys. I pay for this service and I feel it is money well spent! Keep up the good work.

I also pay for this service, and it is well worth the money. And I would probably look for another site if I was bothered by ads while trying to remember the stroke order of certain characters. Just like marchey, I do both Chinesepod and now Skritter, the ONLY two tools REALLY efficient, and that is a lot to say in a market where there is literally thousands of options. I jumped from knowing (mostly passively and approximately) about 400 characters to more than 1200 in a month an a half, and words that I have never seen before begin to make sense on the first time I see them.

The one thing I wish could be added is that if I get a -let's say- three-character-word, I was able to hover over the three characters AFTER I have written them down and see what the first and second char meant. I usually write them down with so much "emphasis", that by the time I wrote the third word, I realize I sometimes didn't even look what the first or the second meant, as single entities, haha!

Qingdaodragon, you can hit the word-level lookup menu (the magnifying glass, on the new practice page) and it will list each character's definition in a row. Let me know if that salves your pain point.

Thanks for your support, guys! With your help, we'll keep working hard to make those characters pour in easier until Chinese people aren't surprised when foreigners can read and write any more.

Thank you for the quick reply, I think I expressed myself incorrectly. First of all, when you mentioned the magnifying glass, I rarely sue the new practice method, it slows down my PC somewhat. But since you mentioned it I just went ahead and practiced with it, waiting for the first two-character word. Wu liao came up [boring]...

I wrote the word "wu", and clicked on the magnifying glass which allows me to see the word in any of the major sites serving as dictionaries. I also had the word "WU" written, and translated, as its own entity. Then I wrote "liao", and the word appeared on the right side of the pad, right below "wu liao"... I could now see two things: the meaning of "Wu liao" on top, and "liao" underneath, but I could not see anymore the meaning of the word "wu" anymore, as an isolated word.

Not that I am complaining, and this won't make me leave skritter, hahaha; just commenting on the fact that after I write a second char, the first one is not shown anymore as its own word anywhere, except if I decide to click and look it up on one of those sites, like nciku and mdbg... :)

Quoting:
[...you mentioned the magnifying glass, I rarely sue the new practice method...]

I meant "use", not sue!!!

Just so everyone knows, I believe the site is worth the money. I'm saying that usership would increase faster if it were free, especially considering its target users (60%+) are overwhelmingly students, who may balk at having to pay for something when they're used to getting everything good on the web for free.

If the service were free and supported by sponsored links, I believe usership might grow fast enough that the site would be able to generate much more revenue in the long run with all the increased usership. This would give the developers more money to bring even better features to the site.

That would be win-win-win.

However, I hadn't considered that the computing/server costs might be high. Chinesepod likely ran into this problem with bandwidth, back when they gave away lessons for free. I believe that was part of their strategy though. Eat losses for a couple years until the site becomes huge, then start charging.

I don't know that I would pay more than $150 for the lifetime subscription...which probably would kill much motivation on your end. Another idea that I like a little better might be to charge for actual time - since you track that anyway. That way I know I'm not going to pay for time I'm not using.

But I quibble. I'll go ahead and shell out the $11 for the next month, and then maybe go up the scale as I'm sure I'll still be using it.

Chinesepod's method's turned me off. I never ended up subscribing to their service. I do subscribe here, though.

Yeah I didn't subscribe to Chinesepod either. Not completely their fault, but I had gotten enough for free from them that I felt that just getting Chinese podcasts from around the web or listening to music or watching stuff would be better (well, almost as good) listening practice (and also free). I do like John and his website (sinosplice) and the quality of the intermediate+ lessons that he made for Chinesepod.

As for the Skritter lifetime subscription... I would assume it would be around the price of a 2 year or at most 3 year subscription... just because a.) a lot of people could probably add 3000+ characters in that time and paying for anything more than review would eventually be less worth it, and b.) as far as web stuff goes, 2 or 3 years might as well be a lifetime, who knows if there will be a better product, or different way of doing things, or for some reason you guys would change your model by then.

Yeah... I'm considering starting Japanese one day, so I think I'd be willing to pay 3 or 4 years' worth for a lifetime subscription in both languages.

Sorry if this is off-topic, but can someone who subscribes to Chinesepod explain what it is exactly that makes it so useful compared to finding our own (free) sources of Chinese audio as Hobbes828 does?

James

Hmmm, I am subscribed to both Chinesepod and Skritter; but what free sources are you talking about? I mean, the lessons at Chinesepod are real life samples, dialogues and really smartly inserted tidbits of every day vocab that really gets into one's head; do you guys have something like that here, and for free? Sorry if this sounds dumb, lol...

off topic...chinesepod.

It is just great to find all these resources in one place. The dialogues are just great and suited for the level you are aiming for. Other resources on the internet are often overshooting or undershooting the level for me. But what I find very useful is the soundbites that come with every sentence in the dialogue and expansion section (paying part of the website). I can use these to improve my listening skills, speaking skills and writing skills too, because I use them for dictation, just playing the clip and writing down what I hear. My routine is: listen to the podcast a few times, then sitting down to work with these soundclips on the website; then add the lesson to my skritter queue to really assimilate the characters. My ultimate goal is to be able to read books and articles, but with my 1000+ characters that is still a long way off. To get there I am sure chinesepod + skritter is the best thing around.

For practicing Chinese characters if I don't need to spend tutor time on stroke orders, the system has paid for itself many times over. It knowing what I need to review and feeding me what to write, also worth far, far more than the few dollars/month I pay.

As for ChinesePod, I subscribed to the guided plan for a while but got busy and had some technical problems (they use(d?) SkypeOut and it didn't work too well the first couple times). The content was good as was my tutor but once I enrolled in Chinese classes in China it sort of seemed overkill to subscribe (and I don't understand the pricing model - $9 for the best part (audio) and an additional $20 for the rest?)

Skritter provides what ChinesePod doesn't--the reading/writing aspect. ChinesePod has some resources, but they're not nearly as engaging as Skritter's.

Skritter reminds me of the written version of Rosetta Stone, which I consider the best resource to get started studying speaking on your own. A big difference between the two, however, is that Rosetta Stone is worthless for Intermediate+ users. Skritter's potential for learning is literally limitless.

I can imagine that if Skritter takes off and the developers make enough money, they'll be able to move into Skritter-style speaking like RS has. You see a sentence, like "The children are drinking milk," and have to speak it. Or you hear "孩子们在喝着牛奶" and have to choose the picture of the kids drinking milk.

When Skritter does this, they will destroy both ChinesePod and RS.

"Sentence" there should have been "picture".

Hey when are we getting an edit feature for the forum?

If we grew and got more resources, I've a ton of ideas for how to make more totally efficient Chinese practice modes: sentence practice, voice recognition, Chinese text readers, oh boy! I'm toying with the idea of doing voice input but just for the tones, as that's actually doable. Maybe I'll do a forum post exploring that idea.

Edit feature for the forum: depends on how much interest there is. (That is, dear readers, make some noise if you want it sooner.)

meh, this forum/community is small enough that the number of times edits seem useful is small, especially since you guys don't keep stickies or recently updated threads on top (where people always edit the first post of long threads).

Plus, mistakes are funny :)