Hello

I was just wondering what you guys are working on and what you plan to focus on in the near and not so near future.

I presume that you have your hands full with all sorts of stuff we users can't even see, such as fixing small bugs and improving performance and changing stroke order etc.

are there other things that might be coming our way, for example new lists of words or motivational speech from hu jin tao :)

There haven't been any updates that users can see for a few weeks, actually, because of the big backend changes we've been doing with the rearchitecturization. Since Scott's gotten ahead of me on those, he's gone and reworked the forums, the vocab list page, and the home page, so those are ready to go when I finish debugging the Flash and the practice page.

So everything's going to hit at once, probably in about another week (after more debugging, testing, and a big data migration). That'll include a bunch of scheduling fixes, more sensible handling of review prompts for characters vs. words and tones, and a bajillion other little things (including a bunch of new bugs, no doubt); we'll have a full list of changes when it all goes live.

In the following futurebit, we're going to put up many more lists, consolidate all our definitions, add pinyin and definition practice, tweak the recognition and scheduling, put grid lines in the Flash window, add buttons to input tones, and perhaps rerecord our audio.

After that, there's hundreds of other things on our list, bugs and features and tweaks aplenty. I won't try to outline what we're planning more than a month out, 'cause that's a very long time in development terms. I will give a non-inclusive list of a few major features that we'll eventually include, though (in no order):

* User-editable definitions
* Japanese
* iPhone support
* Character mnemonic system (like sharing stories about how characters are constructed)
* Component breakdown for each character (going to rock so hard)
* Example sentences
* More community features
* Oodles of vocabulary lists
* Ways to easily add your own words and lists
* Really, really well-tuned recognition and scheduling
* Client-side recognition for speed
* Sentence practice (this one's a maybe)

Skritter's going to be at least three times as effective as it is now, by the time all's said and done. Whoa, is it going to be sweet. Awesome.

that sounds awesome! .... i guess the step after that is to develop a bioelectronic cable which will directly download all the information into the brain...I don't see any other steps that would go in between :)

really looking forward to it

Congrats, this is a really great tool, effective and addictive. However, in the interests of 'flying' through the characters as your introduction suggests, I have a couple of suggestions for speed improvements.

1) Eventual inclusion of the semi-cursive?

As you say somewhere, Chinese is too beautiful a written language to confine to a computer screen. But if we're actually going to write it, I reckon the system would benefit from adding semi-cursive functionality in the future.

One reason is that, primary school teachers aside, that is how the Chinese actually write. Another is that it will speed up character reviews. Many components have semi-cursive 'shorthand' forms and it would be good if the Kitten could recognise at least the most common such squibs. (I quickly got frustrated writing out all the 口　in 哥哥 for example - they take 12 strokes in total when I'd like them to take 8 or ideally just 4.)

I'm not sure not everyone would want this, but for those of us who want to go as fast as humanly possible then it would be a great help.

It's also worth noting that the stroke order for semi-cursive characters can be different (e.g. 为　is basically ゐ in the semi-cursive, swapping the second and third strokes compared to how the Kitten teaches it).


2) Word rather than character reviews?

Rather than sentence practice, I wonder if you could incorporate word reviews rather than single character reviews. Doing all the characters and tones in a two-character word and then getting feedback may offer increased efficiency over doing the four things separately. (I guess it depends on whether both or just one of the characters need to be reviewed.)

There's a few ways I can imagine doing it, but perhaps the easiest is to have a line with two or three slots rather than just one box (much like some electronic dictionaries), such that the Kitten is told which character should go in the confines of each slot and then it does its analysis on each slot as normal. After you've written all the characters in, you can just press two numbers on the keypad for the tones and move on. (e.g. 34, 21, 12 or whatever.)

3. Neutral tone

Maybe it's just me, but I'd like the option of mapping the neutral tone to '5' -- my laptop doesn't have a numberpad and I'd like to keep the five tones together.


Okay that's all for now. Anyway, congrats on a fantastic bit of software.

James

Semi-cursive might be cool to do in the future, but it's technically pretty challenging. We definitely plan to add common writing shortcuts for a few things, like one-stroke 口's. It will be a while, though.

The stroke order should be the same on 为 in both styles -- there's a mistake online now, waiting to be updated. Sorry about that.

Hmm, that's interesting, to have all slots and characters written at the same time. I think, though, that we don't have enough space to do it literally -- each character would get shrunken too tinily, and we can't make the Flash window much bigger for performance reasons. We may be able to do it virtually, though, at some point in the future -- easier switching back and forth through the characters in a word, without having to click "next" after each character but rather after all characters have been written... hmm. Another thing to think about on the to-do list.

Is '5' not working for you on neutral tone? It should be accepting either.