For some of the trickier words, it's not clear what the radical is, and it's slightly annoying having to navigate away from the practice page to view it.

Would it be possible to make the radical show up on the practice page, perhaps hidden until the character is finished (or the user requests it)?

Thanks,
Richard

Hey Richard,

This is actually on our list of things to do. We're going to be doing decompositions so that you can see how the characters break down and what all the radicals are and what they mean.

We have some other large projects we're working on right now though before we can get to that; things like reading and definition practice and general usability things. It's only a matter of time though before we add radical decompositions to our site.

I think a really nice feature would be to break character into "radical" and "sound" parts, and allow users to search for *both* parts. For example:

博
铺
傅
辅
膊
薄
浦
蒲

plus at least 30 other characters all have the same element:

甫

and it gets very confusing trying to remember whether it is "pu" or "po" or "bo" or "fu"; if I see all these characters together I can focus on their differences.

This sounds more like something one could put into a site like MDBG than Skritter, but that said, I'm sure you guys can come up with some way to work it in :-)

阿福, I've just been looking up phonetics and characters after your post, and have a few questions...

Do you pay attention to these when learning characters? Does it help remember them? Does it work for many characters?

Cheers

@Byzanti: It helps for a good number of characters. In many cases the character was originally formed using a phonetic component, but the modern pronunciation may be somewhat or completely different.

As for remembering the characters, I try to make mental associations between characters which share components, and it does seem to help with learning them. The more connections in your memory, the better.

Zhongwen.com has a classification system showing the historical connections between characters. It's traditional characters only, though.

James

Thanks :).

I'm not having much of a problem remembering the characters (make up images/stories), but was finding it rather harder to remember the pronunciation :s.

Will have to pay more attention to characters for phonetic bits.

阿福, Arch Chinese allows you to search characters by its components/radicals. For the 甫 component,

http://www.archchinese.com/arch_component_characters.html?comp=752b

http://www.archchinese.com/arch_chinese_radicals.html

You can search by radicals on MDBG as well:
http://us1.mdbg.net/chindict/chindict.php?page=radicals

Thanks all!

Arch chinese does look good, on my list for when I have more time.

Zhongwen.com actually has nice ethymologies for some characters - maybe it would be a good idea to include content like that on Skritter?

Hi - Glad to hear adding radical/component info is on the feature list. I currently navigate away to Zhongwen.com when I'm curious about the radical/components. Thanks for the great product so far. (I use the add-on on ChinesePod and it's awesome.)