This article from the Chinese American Immersion School makes some interesting points - among them that since most people will do most of their writing on the computer, recognition is more important than production.

I tend to agree with that, and figure I will be pretty happy even if I can never write well by hand, if I can type Chinese.

Still, I figure Skritter is a tremendous way to learn, I just don't sweat the details.

http://www.caisinstitute.org/articles/read_first

it is true that we read more than we write, speak more than do actions including reading, and writing :)

Years ago I ran an experiment where I studied using flash cards that went from English to Spanish (hard) and other flash cards that went from Spanish to English (easy). It turned out that studying in the easy direction didn't help much with the hard direction, while studying in the hard direction did help with the easy direction.

So I think that, even if your goal is to simply be able to read Chinese and type it on the computer, Skritter's writing practice is a great way to get closer to your goal, because it is an active practice mode that is strengthening your memories much more than the passive "do you know the definition?" mode does.

James

I strongly agree with James. Learning to write a characters strengthens your understanding and ability to read it. This will help your reading speed immensely in ways that only being able to recognize it will never get you. It's true that a lot of Chinese people have some problems writing by hand, but they still learned it at one point, and it's safe to say most people can still write daily life stuff without issue.

That said, I didn't do very much writing earlier when I was studying and I don't regret it at all. While I did some, I didn't put a significant effort in to memorize. The characters are much simpler for me to memorize now, when they're familiar, than they would have been when I was first encountering them. A lot I can write without ever really having to have practiced writing. Trying to learn to write at the same time I was learning new vocab would have slowed down my progress hugely and probably killed a lot of my motivation and enjoyment. So, actually, I have to say I agree with the general thinking behind the program.

But...there's a reason the program isn't called "Read Only, Never Write". It's not in any way advocating anyone to simply not learn how to write Chinese. It's going to be really embarrassing when someone asks you to write down something simple like an address or name and you can't. Trust me.

When filling out my wedding application in Chengdu, I was told to use pinyin rather than 汉字. Any mistakes in the application and I'd need to start over. "Don't worry about me. I can handle the 汉字," I said.

So I started with my fiancée's name. Unfortunately I wrote 珋 instead of 柳. My fiancée glared at me--"hey, Murray James!"--and the official passed me a new form...

I used to think I'd be satisfied with just being able to read Chinese. Like others here though, I've found that being able to write has made reading so much easier.

It seems almost old-fashioned to say that writing by hand is necessary despite computer typing. Still, I agree it's pretty embarrassing to have a good level of spoken Chinese but not be able to write.

We had the opposite problem with my wedding forms - trying to figure out how to transliterate my (Taiwanese) father-in-law's name. Damn Wade-Giles.

I did the traditional college course thing for the first three years, where you're supposed to learn to write but you can learn writing short-term and most of your practice is reading. So by the time I was supposed to be able to read and write 1500 characters halfway through third year, I could write maybe half that. I could read most of them, but the knowledge wasn't solid, you know? So I kind of spaced out toward the end of third year.

I graduated, worked on Skritter, and started sitting in on 4th year--just practicing reading/listening/speaking, no writing, since I wasn't doing the essay composition homework. I fell behind in like a second and eventually stopped going because it was too tough.

But, by that point Skritter was starting to work well, so I practiced that on the side while not doing anything else to study. My written characters went from 700 to 2000 in a year (I didn't practice that much, only 90 hours or so), and I went back to sit in on 4th year class again, only to quit again because now it was too easy!

I had all that practice reading and I was struggling to make progress at upper intermediate level. Practicing writing alone let me sail through it. I think you guys have it right: perhaps it's easier to start without writing, but you'll eventually need it to make further progress. I've read a few bloggers who originally said "don't need writing" and got to about where I was at before admitting, "yeah, okay, I need it now."

Murray James, that's an excellent story. I usually mark the characters for Chloe's name wrong in Skritter just so that I know they'll come up often enough that I'll never mess it up.

Poll on how many people have Chinese spouse / fiancé(e) / boy / girlfriend might be interesting :)

It can be useful in a taxi or something if someone doesn't understand what you're saying to be able to write it down. It's also helpful as a way to learn how to decipher other people's handwriting doing some practise on your own. This comes in handy if someone tells you their name, it's some weird character, and they write it down for you.