Hi there,

2 parts to this email - 1 to praise this this fantastic site for what it is doing for learners of CHinese, and 2 a question on Skritter's statistics as a consequence of learning methods...

First, my 5 year old is Skrittering for 10 mins maybe twice a week. She is whizzing through her levelled readers, knows about 65 characters now - can easily read them in sentences, put them in sentences, read them in other contexts and understand meaning and usage. I am saying this not to brag :-) but to give feedback how Skritter has contributed to her ability to recognise characters. She does not use Skritter like us old people, just uses it to 'practice' , show the character, play around trying to get the strokes etc. - BUT it is still networking her brain with the characters, stroke orders etc.

That leads me to the statistics question - when you guys promote your product on retention statistics - does this kind of 'playing around practicing' let your figures down? (Because all her characters would show as being 'wrong').

If so, can users who don't use Skritter to reach a serious retention rate tell you so that you can separate these from your statistics?

I have had this niggling at me for a while now, knowing how valuable this is for my daughter, but wondering how it affects your statistics...

Cheers,
Donna

I think the statistics they give are goals and an example of what some people have been able to achieve, not necessarily an average of every user.

I'm an adult Skrittering every day for about an hour but I'm really bad at remembering some of the stuff so my retention rate stays around 90%.

Even if the statistics they give are an average of every user, your daughter would simply be an outlier cancelling out the effect of other outliers near 100% retention - I don't think it's something to worry about.

True, but I know of a few others whose kids just 'practice' this way - I just thought that maybe there are a a bigger number of users that even though are using the tool for great means, aren't necessarily helping the statistics...

A 'kids' skritter would be awesome (most of my students at the moment are pre-school/early years age), I reckon there would be a growing market for it given the push to learn Asian languages, and research showing the earlier the better...

kids skritter could be kept separate to the grown up skritter ：-）

Cheers,
DOnna

Donna, don't worry about it. Our average retention rate numbers will be imperceptibly affected by your daughter's neglect of the "correct" button. I'm much more excited that your five-year-old is getting something out of it than any stats hit we would take!

The 90.19% retention rate we sent out in the newsletter last month is the average of all reviews done on Skritter during that month. It's very similar every month. Some users are higher, like 95% or more, and some (like your daughter) are lower, but the average is still way better than the 39% that I measured my college classmates at when I asked them to write out a random sample of 150 of the characters they should have known.

As far as a kid's Skritter: yeah, that would be cool. Just not enough resources at the moment to go about making a truly kid-friendly version.