I have just finished my student teaching for elementary education. I also lived in China and taught ESL for almost 10 years. I LOVE Skitter. It's incredible for Chinese character learning, both reading and writing. As I was practicing today, it struck me, "I wonder how many public school teachers who are teaching Chinese as a foreign language know about Skritter?" Have you fellows looked at that market niche? It could be huge.

We do sell school licenses at deep discounts--more info on that here: http://www.skritter.com/institutions

It's often hard for schools to allocate a lot of funds for something that just benefits one or two languages they teach, so we don't do a lot of marketing directly to them, but over the years we've accumulated a lot of great school partners that do offer Skritter for their students.

For me an interesting related question is what apps do kids in Taiwan and China use to practice writing, if any?

(I'm sure is simple and obvious with a little searching, just haven't looked yet.)

Way way way way back in the day, I spent a semester at Nanjing University and my roommate was an ordinary Chinese student there, majoring in literature. And even as a learned, literate guy, he spent about an hour a day writing out characters by hand.

Was thinking about this the other day since my only real dissatisfaction with Skritter is that I would really rather not see any English whatsover in the app, at any time. My dream writing app is basically Skirtter, but definitions all synced up with 現代漢語規範詞典 or similar.

I'd guess the problem with bulk education sales in the US is:
1. requires big discount
2. but very hard to actually get the volume necessary to justify the discount, given fragmented buying process (even a whole school district is probably not that many seats to be licensed).

When your buyers are chronically broke (US school systems) and fragmented, that's difficult.

Snowcreature, many years ago I had a chinese flat mate, and one day we got to talking about how hard it is to remember hanzi. He was pretty impressed when I showed him Skritter and said something like that could be really useful for him.

We lost touch but I can imagine there's a market for some kind of 'native mode' that's aimed at people with a much higher proficiency than the average Skritter user.

>>>Was thinking about this the other day since my only real dissatisfaction with Skritter is that I would really rather not see any English whatsover in the app, at any time. My dream writing app is basically Skirtter, but definitions all synced up with 現代漢語規範詞典 or similar. >>>

I was thinking the same here too. I get really annoyed seeing the English clutter and just want to see all Chinese clutter and definitions and stuff like that.

Interesting. ttjrogers - you probably know better than me, but my impression of ESL in china is that very few want to truly learn english, most interest is in cramming for the tests/test gaming, then forget afterwards - hence the english learning apps are usually simple flashcards rather than srs. Is US educational system that different? How many children will do daily practice (and skritter would be easy to cheat for homework as can forward through and is marked correct etc), isn't it also just cramming before tests?

One problem with a native speaker app is the sweet spot for price in china would be RMB20. Even then, the chinese competitors would pile in, and go for the foreign learners too (with a less polished app no doubt) - good for us users, bad for skritter ;)

We were kind of hoping that 1) more people would be interested in contributing to our zh-zh dictionary and 2) we'd get time to do more internationalization of the interface. If anyone knows of a source of actually appropriate zh-zh or ja-ja definitions (that could be used to prompt you for a word--not the same as most dictionary entries) that we might be able to use or license efficiently, we can look into it.