An idea suddenly popped into my mind for Skritter. Here it is :

English to Chinese definition study.

Currently, there's already a part called "definitions", but this is Chinese to English, which is great, but English to Chinese would be nice to have as well.

The only study part that gives English and asks for something else is writing practice. The problem with relying on writing practice to satisfy English to Chinese translation practice is adding every new item to writing practice isn't very practical because drawing out the characters is time consuming. I think writing practice should only be geared to practicing writing characters, and not for English to Chinese translation practice.

A good name for this area of study could be "translations". It can work the same way as the current "definitions" practice, except give the English instead of Chinese. It can also have the same "don't know, so-so, got it, easy" system, and show both pinyin and characters after being clicked.

I actually have a dictionary app on my itouch that has this exact feature, but the app doesn't have SRS. I was just using the app and I was surprised at how challenging it is, even though I don't think I would have felt challenged if the items that popped up were Chinese to English, instead of English to Chinese.

I really hope this is added to Skritter. I know there's Anki and pleco, but I'd love it if I could have everything in one bundle. I actually don't like Anki, so I'd probably have to go with pleco, which I'm not familiar with.

I can see some benefits against using writing with hidden pinyin, in the sense of, while you might be able to write it, you may have forgotten which word was being asked for, or vice versa, which perhaps isn't terribly efficient. But splitting this in half is more items to study, and I'd rather kill two birds with one stone. If you know the characters, and don't want the extra practice of writing them out, you can always skip over them. I find common characters are written so quickly now, I just write them anyway.

A couple people have asked for something like this: not wanting to do the writing part, but still wanting to go from English to Chinese or English to pinyin. I just don't think that adding an extra part (which is a huge amount of work) is warranted for that use case. How many people get into Skritter without wanting to do the writing? (I know some turn the writing off after.)

While almost all people get into Skritter for the writing I feel this highlights Skritters weaknesses not just its strength of writing. I think you should ask yourselves why did some people choose using other paid programs instead of Skritter. Those answers are Skritters weaknesses and I believe they should be attacked. If Skritter can do everything the competition does plus writing then the competition won't stand a chance.

Yeah, honestly, what got me into Skritter actually wasn't the writing practice, believe it or not. I heard about the writing practice and I tried it out and thought it was cool, but what really attracted me was the tones practice. When I first started using Skritter, I could already read and write in both traditional and simplified Chinese, but I had trouble with tones.
All that being said, I think Skritter has evolved from being just a writing practice website to offering much more than that. I think this other part that I suggested would be worth the time/effort.

From one fairly-long-user's perspective, the (unaided) writing practice, plus tone reinforcement, is what both got me into Skritter and keeps me coming back. Translation practice I can do with language partners in Mainland China.

@mike do you use the definition study feature on Skritter ?

I think the question shouldn't be what would we like to see in Skritter. Although I sure am happy they listen to our suggestions. I think the question is what would a user of another program need to see in Skritter to make them want to stop using it and switch to Skritter. Basically Skritter needs to do a survey of a lot of people already studying with another program that know about Skritter but choose the other program anyway.

I think it would be best to do two surveys; one would be for different Japanese / Chinese clubs (for people not taking classes at college but are interested in learning), highschools (without japanese or Chinese programs but have students interested in learning) and the second for students studying at school. Have them look at different programs tell you wich one they would choose to study with and why.

I think this is the last thing that Skritter needs, because there already is definition study that goes from Chinese to English, but there isn't the reverse order option.
Writing is super important and Skritter's writing practice is one of a kind, but it doesn't replace English to Chinese flashcard-style practice. The "kill 2 birds with 1 stone" argument is impractical for this case, because there are hundreds of thousands of words in languages, and to thoroughly review the words that have been learned on a day to day basis takes an efficient method. Even if it only takes 1-2 seconds to write a character, there might be 2 or more characters in a word, which would mean it may take about 5 seconds to write something like
图书馆 (if written extremely quickly). With English to Chinese definition practice, this might take less than a second, which means it could be more than 5 times as fast. So, I think that in this case, killing 2 birds with 1 stone could really just mean killing time

@Bohan Nope! Thanks for asking. Although when I add new words and their definitions to the dictionary, I do try to make them detailed (and in Chinese)

Rather than simply English to Chinese I think it would be much better if there were more Chinese to Chinese definitions. If I see a new English word I would never bother to first look up the Chinese definition since it's inefficient and I would probably not really get the meaning from it. Likewise if you do a Google translation of a passage and translate the passage back and forth a few times it will quickly loose it's original meaning. In other words, if you are using a translated word to get the meaning of a word in another language you are advised to use a large pinch of salt (also depending on the kind of word and the degree of separation of the languages etc.)

I'm not saying what you suggest is a total waste of time, but I'm saying that it's far more important to have and understand Chinese-Chinese definitions than English-Chinese. In fact, I can't see why all the definitions here don't contain both Chinese and English meanings. Learning the English definition is necessary, but it should also be your aim to also be able to understand the Chinese definition and if possible even give the meaning in Chinese.

@malaili2 Thanks for supporting the idea.

If anyone else out there thinks this is a good idea, or if you think you would use such a feature, you should probably post a comment on this thread to show you're in favor of it, or else the Skritter guys will think nobody wants it

Bohan I think I sort of misunderstood what you said originally but now I think I get it. Do you want to be shown a whole sentence in English a be asked to translate it into a whole sentence in Chinese?

@ddapore99 What I'm suggesting is basically the same thing as the current "definitions" practice on Skritter, in which a Chinese item such as a word or phrase pops up and asks you if you know the definition in English. Except what I'm suggesting is to also have an English to Chinese practice part on Skritter.

So for example, an item such as "cheetah" will pop up, and ask "do you know the Chinese definition?". The user will then take a moment to try to recall the Chinese word for "cheetah" , which is 獵豹(lie4bao4). The user then clicks on the "cheetah", and the answer pops up in both Chinese characters and pinyin, and then asks "did you get it?", at which point the user can choose any of the same options that are offered in the current "definitions" practice (don't know, so-so, got it, easy).

So are you saying it would be the same as it is now but instead of writing the word the user would just say if they knew it or not?

yeah, so the idea behind this is rapid word recall, without writing.

There are hundreds of thousands of words in all languages, and writing each and every word that we want to do English to Chinese reviews for is truly impractical, and I'll prove why :

Suppose I've spent a long time studying Chinese and I want to use Skritter as a tool to remember most of the words/phrases I've learned. Suppose I know 100,000 words(which includes all kinds of abstract words), and I load those words onto my Skritter account. Even if I were to do 100 writing reviews every single day(this doesn't include doing other reviews on Skritter), it would take about 3 years to make a complete cycle, and that's assuming that I get every single item right. Not only is this a really long period of time, this can also potentially be really deceptive because once we roll around to words that haven't been reviewed in a long time, we might remember how to write the characters within a word , but were not able to recall the word itself. An example of this could be the word "intersection". If we're prompted to recall the word "intersection" in Chinese, we may possibly forget that it's lùkǒu , but then once we see that the characters within that word are 路 and 口 , we could be deceived into thinking "oh, yeah, I knew that, those characters are really simple".

So, while writing is important, it's not a substitute for this area of language learning/reviewing, which quite honestly is probably even more important than character writing. I've been learning Chinese for nearly 10 years, and I LOVE writing Chinese characters!!!! But as much as I love writing them, and as cool as I think they are, it's very possible to be able to write thousands of characters, but not be able to have a decent conversation about a movie or current event in Chinese. The feature that I'm trying to get the Skritter guys to make will allow for efficient rapid-recall, and will probably also improve the writing practice on Skritter, because then users won't be rushing through writing reviews but rather taking their time to enjoy/master character writing

Bohan, I support your suggestion and your view. It also happens to me very often, that I am able to write a word in Skritter or know the definition, but during a conversation I just can't remember it. So my next target is to enlarge my active vocabulary; if Skritter could help also in this direction, I would love it.
But I think you will agree, that this is only a part of this process, reading, listening, etc. is also important. Skritter won't never be the magic all-in-one weapon.

Ah I see your point of view. But I believe their needs to be a major shift in the way we study to achieve your goal. I don't believe cutting out character study is enough. First I would recommend reading this page as it is the foundation for my suggestion.
http://lesley-lanir.suite101.com/vocabulary-learning-difficulties-storage-or-retrieval-problems-a335349
Basically we need to create a web of links between words in our heads with the most important words getting the most links. With flashcard programs like Skritter we are just getting a 1 to 1 link for everything.

I believe the ideal solution would be to have sentences for every word. But each sentence should only contain already learned vocabulary items. The the words would be there to make connections to already learned vocabulary items. The number of sentences with a vocabulary item that is already know should correspond to it's importance. But instead of doing this with writing it should be done with speaking. My wife has a program on her DS where she will hear a native English speaker speaking a sentence. Then she repeats that sentence into the DS microphone and the DS tells her how close she came to sounding like the example sentence. I know asking for a feature like this in Skritter would be near impossible (like asking them to reconstruct skritter from scratch for one feature) so I have never mentioned it but I believe a computer audio evaluation would be as important as the writing part is to Skritter.

@Roland Thanks a lot for showing your support ! Good luck with your studies !

@ddapore99 I agree with method you mentioned about learning sentences that have newly learned vocab words in them. With the feature I'm suggesting, that could be done because you can enter a new item/sentence into Skritter's database at any create a custom definition for it. So, for example, you can create the sentence :
"我饿死了" , and then make a custom definition such as "I'm starving." Then using the feature I'm suggesting, you'd see "I'm starving" pop up, and you would have to recall "我饿死了” 。

Here are some examples of English word associations that might work well as example sentences or definitions in Japanese or Chinese.

Medicine,coffee, and tea __________

Cake, ice cream, and cookies ______

French fries, steak, and cake _______

Seasoning, plant, and pudding ______




1. Cake, ice cream, and cookies all taste _________.

a. salty

b. bitter

c. sweet

d. vanilla

2. French fries, steak, and cake are all _______ food.

a. tasty

b. bitter

c. sweet

d. vanilla

3. She thinks medicine, coffee, and tea are ________ .

a. sweet

b. tasty

c. bitter

d. vanilla

I got them from here.

http://paulkuehn.hubpages.com/hub/How-To-Teach-EFL-And-ESL-Learners-Vocabulary-With-Word-Associations

So how about it, Nick ? Three people from this thread (Roland, malaili2, and me) have expressed interest in this. You also mentioned that a couple of other people have asked you about this as well. I really think this is the last really important thing that's absolutely necessary for the site and app.

"So, for example, you can create the sentence :
"我饿死了" , and then make a custom definition such as "I'm starving." Then using the feature I'm suggesting, you'd see "I'm starving" pop up, and you would have to recall "我饿死了” 。"

This is exactly how every single flashcards program ever works?

@Byzanti yep, it sure is. Skritter is missing that right now. If you're suggesting that people should use other flashcard programs, my response to that is that it would be MUCH more convenient if we could do it right on Skritter along with all of the other parts we study. The inconvenience of always loading everything we learn onto a separate program, and then remembering to balance the use between the 2 programs makes me want to vomit.

Also, it actually wouldn't be the exact same as every other flashcard program, because those study items would get mixed into our SRS queue, and not all flashcard programs have that kind of spaced repetition

I don't like flashcard-style grading-yourself prompts, and making another one of them that covers the same thing as the writing prompts (with hidden reading) still doesn't sound like the best use of time to me. Have you used some prompting style like this before and found it effective and engaging? I want to solve the problem, but in a different way that facilitates active recall better, possibly in the context of sentence practice instead of word practice.

I guess we agree that "this is the last thing that Skritter needs", in a sense!

Bohan, you want to keep doing the writing prompts and having them scheduled separately, so repurposing those with a trick to show/grade the entire word at a time instead of character-by-character wouldn't suit you?

By the way, I don't think you're going to end up needing to know 100,000 Chinese words. Do you know the size of your English vocabulary? I found some online test for mine at some point and it was only 32,000 or something like that.

I want to keep doing all the writing prompts I've been doing. I don't understand the question

When I rely on Skritter too much for studying my ability to derive a definition and the pinyin from seeing a word or character is 很厉害. My ability to write down a word that is spoken to me in Chinese is also 很厉害. When trying to translate words from English to Chinese I feel average.

"A boy was once prompted to speak the word carrot in Chinese. He couldn't remember, but his hand magically wrote 胡萝卜 on the blackboard. He then read what he had just written out loud."

So I suppose I agree with the notion their is a slight gap in learning, but also agree there has to be a more innovative way to bridge it.

My thoughts on prompts that help fast recall being incorporated *into Skritter*... while nice in theory (hey, its more comprehensive!) I think there is a certain point where SRS/flashcards need to stop being your first line of offense in improving aspects of your Chinese.

In the case of fast recall I think the best solution is putting yourself in situations where you actually *need* to produce Chinese at a steady pace - say, making a goal to type or write a journal entry of a certain length each day (http://lang-8.com/), chatting regularly with Chinese friends on QQ (http://im.qq.com/), and chatting in person if you have the luxury of living near a population of Chinese speakers.

Yes, I think adding the described functionality could help improve your recall of words in Chinese. But it certainly isn't a priority in my estimation, and I think if you're considering this kind of functionality very useful/necessary for your studies (say, worth spending 10 more minutes a day Skritter'ing with) you might want to look into some of the suggestions above to use that 10 minutes on first.

Let's not forget that flashcards should just be one of many approaches towards improving Chinese; Skritter is a huge help in that regard, especially with writing, but it isn't and shouldn't try to become a panacea - I prefer them being excellent at what I think is actually worth paying for (handwriting), not putting a lot of time and effort into duplicating what is already very easily done in Anki or other free programs (that can be very easily integrated with Skritter vocab).

@icebear what are some other flashcard programs that you know of ? I don't hate Anki

On Mac Anki is probably the best free one... I can't comment any further than that, as it more than met my needs when I was using it before. I found the interface a bit cumbersome the first time through but once you've spent a session or two with it all the necessary functions are easy enough to use. I'm pretty sure it would be trivial to import a Skritter exported list and force it to give you reverse cards (English prompts, Chinese/pinyin answers) that would closely approximate what you are looking for.

I'm not sure why you're looking for alternatives if you "don't hate" it?

I can't comment for Chinese, but for Japanese learning renshuu.org > all (except writing kanji...that's where Skritter pwns face).

There are lots of flashcard apps for iOS; the one I've tried is flashcards++ and it seemed pretty good. Have a look at this site: http://www.flashcardapps.info/

You can search by the criteria that are most important to you, including SRS.

"@Byzanti yep, it sure is. Skritter is missing that right now."

I think flashcards like this are great - sentences like you say, English to Chinese, Chinese to English. But I'm not convinced by your assertion it'll be more convenient to have everything in one place, and that place is Skritter.

To consider:
1. Skritter would have to have a new database system to handle it: the current one is not appropriate for putting in all these sentences, let alone flashcards with multiple sentences (I find very helpful), or a mix of Chinese-English etc.
2. Without significant work, it wont reach the flexibility of Anki. I have a flashcards deck which plays audio for pronunciation. Also in this deck I have large pictures of tongue position etc.
3. Ease of searching through all the cards, making changes etc - Skritter would be slow for this. Anki locally is instant.
4. The first two, perhaps three, are of course doable, but Anki/Memosyne etc already do these very well.
5. Skritter's selling point is writing characters.

What is it you don't like about Anki? I think it's very good. iOS app is a little bit buggy on new versions of iOS, but the author has been having trouble with the toolkit and is now rewriting it in Objective C.

@ Byzanti

Fully agreed. If Skritter is reinvesting some of their revenue in developing new functionality, replicating what is already very well done and freely available (Anki) seems like a waste.

There is already a growing murmur of interest in an eventual Android app, which of couse would be after the iOS version is polished for release, not to mention bug killing in the Flash version. I think all of these clearly take priority over any overhauls in the card-sides or SRS-system which may only seem superficially easy.

@Byzanti @icebear you guys can relax and we can just stop talking about this. Nick already said they're not going to do it