I'm a total newbie to both Chinese and Skritter. I only found Skritter today, and started learning Chinese only 2 days ago, so I don't know if this is just a dumb question, or a brilliant new feature idea.

Almost every character my first vocab set gave me was new. This is despite recognizing most of the characters in the little "preview" window, and practicing several characters on my own, mostly via Wikibooks and animation.archchinese.com .

I tried looking for a button or something that gave me the stroke order of the new character, but all I got was the image, and a bad attempt to "guess" the stroke order. I pretty much kept visiting animation.archchinese.com , inputting the pinyin and selecting the character manually, and then copying that stroke order. (sometimes I looked back in the middle of writing out the character, because after seeing it only once, I forgot which stroke came next)

This was a total pain. Something which, as an easily accessibly feature on your site, can potentially be one click or keystroke away. Also, it is an extra flash window opened in a browser tab, which you site guys asked us to point out. *here it is!*

Does Skritter have an option to show the stroke order of a new character you've never encountered before? This website, animation.archchinese.com , flash animates it for you. So I know Skritter potentially could as a "hint" in addition to the "phantom." Or, like this website, it can step-reveal each stroke without giving away the whole character, so you could get away with even less of a "hint" than the "phantom," too. Unless your site already does all this, in which case please ease this newbie's mind with revealing where these features are, and how I can use them.

If these options do not exist, and the philosophy is *speed*, this would surely have made my experience MUCH more speedy, maybe even feasible to learn every character you offer without ever leaving this site relatively quickly!

Also, I couldn't tell if the definitions given for multi-character words were for the whole word, or just one of the characters. I'm assuming the whole word. What's the deal?

These might be good points to include in the FAQ/guide, as I consulted both to no avail before coming here. I also searched the forum-- so here I ask.

Hope this will be helpful to people other than just me. You at least get a cool new link. :-)

When I learned how to swim, my dad just threw me in the pool. I learned to swim very quickly. I think it was a much better experience than having a swimming teacher show me how to do it. Likewise, you will have better retention if you are forced to learn the stroke orders on your own. Actually, I just made up that story, and my argument is also totally made up. However, going from scratch, my guess is that you will pick it up pretty quickly. I'd rather the hardworking skritter folks put energy into other important tasks. But, that's just my take.

I'm pretty new to this myself, but I've found that the general rules at http://www.skritter.com/stroke-order and the fact that the application shows you when you make strokes out of order allows me to pick up the stroke order for a new character rather quickly.

Although I get your point, but I would guess that this difficult phase at the very beginning is over very quickly. The rules (and they do exist:) are quite simple and after you've got the hang of the first few characters (and seriously...it's won't be more than twenty or thirty) you will be able to get totally new characters right.

So although I see your point and I think it is a valid one, I would guess that considering how quickly you will get the hang of it, it doesn't really justify a new feature which is probably requires quite a big amount of work to set up. Maybe worth putting on the low-priority list?

Anyway, welcome to the Chinese learners! :) jia you!

David

Thanks all.

I'm sure this would have been obvious if I wasn't learning on my own (like, in a course), and if I had learned more than 30 characters before coming here. (and not been spoiled by that stroke animating website-- and had been learning for more than 3 days)

Maybe a low priority for the developers, as Baifameizhong stated, probably a feature for absolute beginners just thinking about learning Chinese simply stumbling upon this website, trying it out, wondering if its worth paying for. Maybe prompting people in the middle of drawing a character so stroke order rules are learned? Seeing how much of a "turn off" this was for me, I'm sure it would turn away even less committed, more naive people absolute beginners from paying for this service who otherwise might. Even if this was just for 20-30 pre-programed "beginners characters" and no more, to get low level people used to the rules, it might get them into it enough to stay with the service. But I have no way of knowing how many more people like me there are who would simply leave the site rather than commenting on these forums, so I'm sure some sort of more objective cost/benefit analysis would determine if such a feature was worth it.

Oh! When you go Japanese, I'm sure something like that will help absolute newbies write Hiragana and Katakana syllables. I know several people who simply started learning Japanese on their own without any formal instruction, and finding this kind of site early on would have had them blazin'.

Hi GabrielKoulikov,

Actually, we are planning on adding something like what you describe. It is a lower priority feature, but it will not be that hard to do, actually. Something like an alternate function for the phantom button (Ctrl+click perhaps), or if it can be made really cool, maybe even the main function, where the strokes animate into place really fast. Although, doing stroke direction might take some more work.

You're right that the User's Guide isn't all that instructive right now. It's a high priority for us to rewrite, since we've added a bunch of new and undocumented stuff with the recent big update. We'll probably do that in the next couple weeks, now that George is back.

Don't worry about suggesting features, either; often things that are obvious to users are invisible to us. There are a always a lot of things that we'll work on just as soon as that next bug is fixed.

Hi GabrielKoulikov

I hope I didn't sound patronising in my post, because that is absolutely not what I wanted to be (I also didn't mean to leave that many mistakes behind in that post:).
Maybe I underestimated that phase at the very beginning and I by no means wanted to put you off. I have been learning Chinese (admittedly not in the highest gear) for a few years now and I had already mastered a certain level when I bumped into Skritter, so stroke order was not perfect but not enough of a problem to get me thinking about it.

I am, however, quite sure that if you get a good introduction to the topic (this is not a judgement on the article provided by Skritter...I never read it;) it should all fall into place really quickly.(Although that feature wouldn't do any harm at all) It might also be an interesting idea, if stroke order is something tricky, to start off with the first 30-40 radicals in the Skritter radical list. Although they might not seem rewarding right then (often abstract meanings which are seldom used on their own in "normal" Chinese) they will appear with a very high frequency (as in every character or every other character) in the normal characters...and the stroke order is always the same.
(Not sure whether you have already stumbled across this but radicals are usually elemental Chinese characters which are used to build up the majority of the Chinese characters...the amount of radicals within a given Chinese character typically vary from one to four. They will often also give an indication of the basic meaning and/or pronunciation of the character) (that "one to four" could also false, it is not a number I looked up but, as we say in German, "I sucked it out of my thumbs", so if someone else tells you something else, chances are they are right:).

David

One additional point on this is that the Skritter user interface already provides a bit of the type of stroke order hint that GabrielKoulikov was looking for.

The interface will give you a quick blue flash of the expected next stroke if you make several (four, I think) unrecognized strokes in a row. So if you're totally in the dark as to what the next stroke should be, you can just make several obviously-bogus strokes, and you'll get the blue "next-stroke" hint.

This is admittedly not as easy or intuitive as having a full stroke order animation, or a simple "next stroke" button or keystroke, but it works pretty well.