Hello, I have mentioned all this before but I thought I might as well add it again and see what others thought. I love Skritter but having used it for a while I have some issues with it.

I think the learning process is not effective for two reasons:

1) Skritter's definitions don't tell you enough about what situations the word can be used in. For example, take these two:

混雑: disorder, confusion
混乱: confusion, disorder

Every time I correctly remember the meanings, Skritter boots them further off into the future. But the problem is that I have learned nothing at all about what the difference is between these two words. And there is a clear difference: one describes Shinjuku station in the morning and one describes the streets of Egypt during the recent protests.

That difference would be the important thing to learn, not that both can sometimes be translated as disorder/confusion.

Writing is a productive skill, not a passive one, so we should be learning how and when to use the words, not just how to understand them when we see them.


2) Skritter's definitions don't tell us anything about collocations.

Take the following character and Skritter's definition:

損: loss, damage

What kind of loss, what kind of damage, we don't know (see point 1). But even if we did know, there is another barrier before we can use it properly. We don't know what verbs go with 損.

For just one example, 損 often goes with 抑える (to reduce losses). If I know what sort of loss it is, and I know it goes with that verb, then I can actually write it in a sentence. But without it, my knowledge of how to write 損 is equivalent to trivia.

I appreciate implementing a system to create a collocation database could take ages unless you license access to a Japanese corpus dictionary or equivalent, but it doesn't have to be that thorough to start with. Even just embedding a few sample sentences from google search results may give a sense of how to use a word. (Perhaps you could have it display the top two results when searching for "損を”、”損に” and "損が” to show how it fits in different parts of the sentence, for example.)

I am sure you can come up with infinitely better ideas than that too. But somehow I want that info on the screen there next to the characters so that if I don't know how to make a sentence with a word, I just have to move my eyes to find out.

For me, the worry is that the longer it takes to sort these issues out, the further and further away 損, 混雑 and 混乱 will get in the queue as I keep learning them. I fear that I will have to one day repeat all my characters in an upgraded Skritter just to learn how to use all the words I can write.

Skritter's a great tool and has the potential to be stunningly useful, but at the moment I think Skritter does not target its stated purpose head-on. Of course, many people using this may be taking language classes and using textbooks etc. so they will probably have a broader set of learning resources. In that case, this issue won't be such a big deal for them, probably. Perhaps the above should primarily be seen as a comment from someone just using Skritter as a learning tool.

Look forward to hearing what others think, and whether people have their own efficient workarounds for solving these sorts of problems.

Best,
James

Hi James,

IMHO Skritter is a learning tool to write characters and not a one stop shop to teach a language or learn to right full sentences or essays, I would suggest that nothing can replace text books and classes for learning usage and grammar.

I for one am using Skritter to bring my Chinese reading and writing up to speed with my speaking and listening. I know that a lot of others are using Skritter to keep up with vocab learning for classes and this is where Skritter excels.

On the Chinese side we do get example sentences, I'm guessing they are not available for Japanese learners just yet? I will admit that they are very useful.

I love Skritter for what it is - the best character learning resource since the bi lingual dictionary, but I think everyone would agree you need to use more than just Skritter to learn proper language usage, in fact, the more resources the better!

Regards,

Oz

In some ways I agree and in some ways I don't.

Skritter is a tool to help you learn how to write Kanji and Hanzi. That is the stated purpose and goal of the site and in that I think think it does a great (fantastic / other superlative) job.

What it does not do is to teach sentence construction and grammar.

I have realised that I spend too much time concentrating on Skritter and not looking at the other parts of my learning such as writing sentences and getting them checked by my teacher and as such I might be good at recognising characters, but I still don't know how to create words and sentences with the characters I know.

I am a Chinese learner, you seem to be a Japanese learner, but the same issues seem to apply. Skritter (as is the stated aim) will teach us how to write the correct character (either Kanji or Hanzi), but it is up to us to find other learning methods to be able to make the characters usable.

To me, Skritter is one tool of many that should be used to help learn a language (Chinese or Japanese), but it certainly is not the only one. If one were to rely on Skritter as the only tool to learn the language then I think one would fail, but taking the published aim of Skritter to be "the write way to learn Chinese and Japanese" the aim of the web site is to help with learning to write characters rather than to help with the subtleties of grammar, sentence construction or character collocation.

For your particular question, I believe that you should be asking someone with a specific knowledge (teacher / native speaker) where you should use the two different words, the differences between them and what the collocations are. Skritter helps you learn how to write that characters, you must find other methods to learn the best way to use those words or characters.

As you say, people using Skritter as a tool whilst also using other tools, won't see your issue as a big problem (they have native speakers / teachers to ask), but Skritter (to me) is a tool to aid learning by other methods, not a single resource in its own right. I do not expect to learn Chinese (or Japanese) just from using Skritter, it is a tool that helps me learn characters building on other resources, whether using other online sites such as ChinesePod (or Japanese equivalents) and/or language classes.

In short, yes, Skritter could be better if it was able to be a complete teacher, but the stated aim is to help with character writing and recognition and I believe it does a fantastic (great / other superlative) job. For all other parts of language, such as tight definitions of words, character collocations, sentence construction or grammar, other tools are needed and necessary and I don't believe that one tool (Skritter or otherwise) could ever be the "magic fix" to learning a language.

I agree with Oz and Happy Blue that Skritter is a limited tool and it is great at what it does: teaching characters. However, I did not realize the Chinese learners had example sentences and I think it is a great feature that should be implemented on the Japanese side. I know the sentences are available; jisho.org has a ton and I think they are using a publicly available database which is maintained through tatoeba.org. I think we can discuss ways to make Skritter better once both languages have the same features!

As for workarounds James, I generally have a tab of jisho.org open while I am studying so if I don't understand a word, I can look it up in the dictionary and see a few example sentences.

Hi frozenpea,

I think there are a couple features we already created that might help you: custom definitions and the word popup with its containing words list.

On the study page and in the word popup as well, you can edit the definition of any word or character, so that for your disorder/confusion example you can clarify their definitions to your liking, and if you want you can click the checkbox to submit it as a correction for our dictionary so everyone using Skritter can benefit.

And for individual characters, you can open up the word popup and a short list of words that character is one of the many things that will show up. You can then click them to learn more about them or to add them to your studies. You can open up the word popup on the practice page by clicking the magnifying glass.

Example sentences will also really help with your aims I think, and that's rather high on my priorities to improve the Japanese side of things. What we already have I hope helps you in the meantime!

@frozenpea in addition to all the above advice (which is great) you can study complete sentences in Skritter, although it's not really optimized for it. I study a lot of idiomatic phrases in Chinese, which is great for learning context. You can also use another SRS such as Anki to study complete sentences, then add the characters to Skritter.

James (W)

Thanks for all the comments and useful suggestions. I'll certainly adopt some. I am also glad to hear that there are sample sentences on the Chinese version -- I used to use the Chinese software back in 2009 but stopped when I left Beijing. That must have been before this feature was introduced. I look forward to seeing them on the Japanese side!

But just to clarify, I was not asking for grammar and I am not asking for a holistic language learning tool. It's just that knowing a word of a language is fundamentally about knowing how to use it -- it is not about knowing how to define it or knowing some word in another language that it can correspond to.

As an ex-pat working in Japan and without time for textbook-based classes, I want stuff I can actually use. It would be great if Skritter could introduce new words in a ready-to-deploy state.

Otherwise, Skritter sounds like something for people who are learning languages, but not using languages, which has to be a contradiction.