but I don't see the writing practice any more.
All I see after I press 'study' is Study from one of 146 textbooks and Make your own custom list, but I'm not ready for that.
Where are the other functions?

Welcome to Skritter! In order to study you have to tell skritter what it is you want to study. So, you need to choose a ready-made list or make your own. If you don't have a textbook or any other material you're using, then you could try starting with the HSK1 list: http://www.skritter.com/vocab/list?list=47872248.

You'll remember words and characters much better if you learn them in context though. I suggest www.chinesepod.com (newbie level) if you're just starting out.

Assuming you're studying Chinese, that is :0)

That was a big assumption on my part. If it's Japanese you want I'm not much help.

Thank you :) and yes, it's Chinese. ;)

What are you ready for? Are you studying Japanese or Chinese?

I am not ready for ready for reading/writing in Chinese without hints. And I'm new on this site, and it takes some time to get how it works. :)

by the way, do you know how to see the hints like "write the bottom line first..etc" while I'm practicing the writing?

If you click and hold the "Show" button it will show you the stroke order. You can adjust the speed of this in your study settings. You can also adjust how strict you want skritter to be about stroke order.

If you draw a stroke the wrong way it should automatically give you feedback like "stroke backwards", etc.

oh nice! now this part is clear!
how about the tones, somehow I can't get when it's 1, 2 and 4th tone. Once I read the comparisson between some English words and the Chinese sounds, I saw these hints while writing on this site, before I subscribed, and they'd be useful for me now too.

Well, first of all tones is one of the four parts of study (the others are writing, pinyin and definitions), so as long as you have this box checked in your settings you will get prompts specifically asking you for the tones of a word/character. Actually you also have to get the tones right in pinyin prompts, so by doing both you'll get plenty of tone practice.

Also when you do writing prompts the pinyin will be shown with tone marks (you can hide the pinyin if you don't want it as a hint, but it will still show after you've drawn the character). You can even have the pinyin written in a different colour for each tone (also in study settings).

Also, for stroke order, we have this page:

http://www.skritter.com/stroke-order

If you want to do the demo again, it's here:

http://www.skritter.com/demo

thank you!!! That's very helpful!

I have 2 other questions:
1. is some kind of voice recognition here, to practice the speech?
2. I saw that chinesepod.com is bound with this site by the writing side of it, but will the newbie audios be aviable or must they be paid separetly from this site? Is chinesepod.com a very useful site? =)
(I hope my English is clear)

No voice recognition - but others might suggest websites that connect language exchange partners (I've never tried that, as I have friends in China I can Skype instead to keep up).

As far as I know, the Skritter connection with ChinesePod.com is only available if you are currently a subscriber to ChinesePod. From Skritter's side you are just able to import key vocabulary from studied lessons more easily.

For audio content from ChinesePod you will need to subscribe to their service (except for those brief weekly trials), not Skritter. I'm a long time subscriber and would say if you have the money, and limited time/access to oral lessons where you live, they are a great addition to your studying tool kit. They won't guarantee fluency, but they are helpful in improving your audio comprehension, convenient, and in my opinion have much better production value than the free alternatives. That said, there are free alternatives out there if the money is an issue...

No voice recognition yet; I keep thinking how much fun it would be to build, but when I ask the users, it doesn't seem like the killer feature that I think it would be.

If you're a Premium subscriber on ChinesePod, you can pull in the ChinesePod lesson vocab to Skritter. You can also have an older Skritter Lite scratchpad embedded into ChinesePod with Premium there. Unrelated to any ChinesePod subscription, ChinesePod graciously provides most of the Chinese audio files we use. That's the extent of the integration--hope it answers your question. ChinesePod is useful indeed. It is a separate subscription.

Thanks both.
Yes Icebear. I got it.I'll try to use Chinese when meet the Chinese people I know. :)
Wish you luck with your iPhone progect, Nick! :o)

Can you please help me to add new words to my vocab list?
I've tried at least 10 times, taking levels of several textbooks, but the words didn't add, because "the last 4 words had to be new, not repeated"... I've tried it all the ways.
What's the solution?

How are you going about studying? If you click the study link and then click "Study All My Lists", you shouldn't see a problem like that.

yes, but there are just 9 items in it.
The words are always the same.

I was working right now and it started to add new words, so the issue is solved. :)
Congratulations for this site!

Now, another question :D

ren
person; man; people (Kangxi radical 9)
what does exactly Kangxi radical mean?

@dsnow;

The Kangxi radicals are the building bricks that characters are made of. In the case of 人, it is one of the radicals that is used (in a modified form) in many other characters.

If you are new to writing, I highly recommend studying the radical list. Although many of these characters aren't very useful on their own, it helps to know the building blocks and also it makes a lot of the mnemonics more meaningful and so it is easier to remember each character.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kangxi_Dictionary
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radical_(Chinese_character)

Here's some info on the Kangxi dictionary, which was an old Chinese dictionary that defined 214 radicals. "Radical" can be thought of as a rough term for "common character component".

Hi there, welcome to Skritter.
I love Skritter and I am certain you will too.

HappyBlue and Nick, Thanks a lot!


@allisonting, thank you! :)))

Hi dsnow,

Welcome to Skritter!

I'd just like to point out that Skritter is a great resource for learning to read and write Chinese, but it's not a stand-alone solution for Chinese. It's best used in conjunction with text books, self study books or classes. However, it is far and away the best resource for learning the Characters and how to write them (arguably the hardest part of learning Chinese) in my opinion!

May I ask how you are planning to learn Chinese? I understand that you are just starting out and there are many Skritter users who have tonns of great ideas for learning and even a few of teach Chinese as a second language who could give you some advice.

Hi ocastling,

Thanks!

that's what I was thinking about...
today has started my real subsribtion to this site,
but I don't know how to use it.
I began watching some Chinese episode, with subtitels, but it is hard to get the phrase construction and the rest.
I really don't know where to start.

Some days ago I spoke with some Chinese girls, and they told me that Yes, writing is the hardest part, but they also told me to practice speech and listening.

So I'm looking for some advice.
What should I do?

I planned to lern it inderectly, by getting the words in the series, and writing them down. But it seems harder than I thought. Infact I'm asking for some advice.

Ps: there are some classes here, but I thought to get used to writing a bit before starting them.

I don't know how far you are along the learning process, so please discount any of this if it doesn't apply! I think the best way to start is to get a feel for the language - have some lessons, hear it, speak a bit, learn pinyin. Once you have a grasp of it, then by all means start learning characters, but don't get bogged down in them. Characters are definitely important, but they wont help you say basic sentences.

When learning characters, I would recommend following a book that focuses on characters, so you're learning the easiest characters first, and then have a basis you can build up on. Complex characters are on the whole just a bunch of simple characters mashed together. But you need to learn the simple ones first. Heisig is a textbook (and a list on Skritter). It's a good example of this -- it has a good structure for learning characters (I never actually used the book, just the list on Skritter...).

However doing it this way a lot of the characters you learn will not be immediately practical. What you might want to do is also add vocab from a textbook, if you're studying one. That way it's part good structure/part useful stuff that you want to learn.

Saying that, I went all out with Heisig. While it gave me a great basis for characters and learning future vocab, my Chinese didn't progress at all for the 3 months it took me to study the list... I had time though!

Hi! I'm at the very beginning of the learning process. Today I found such a book, its name is Living Language-Chinese Mandarin the basics.
And yes, I'll check out Heisig! Thanks!
Btw, what do you mean by "learning pinyin"?

You've no doubt seen it! Pinyin is generally the way pronunciation is shown if you're not using characters. Language learners and young Chinese kids use it.

Eg, You can say: nǐhǎo ni3hao3 instead of 你好.

Upside is learning this is pretty quick, and you can use it to see how to pronounce words when you check a dictionary.

Yes yes! I've seen it! =)
I'm aware that I'm not used to Chinese caracters at all, when I run into a page written in Chinese it's so hard to think that all that is made of sounds and meanings.
Maybe it's pathetic to say, but it's so.

Thanks.