I was playing around with a new SRS site for learning Chinese today, I don't think it competes with Skritter really because they have speaking, recognition, and typing pinyin practice, but no writing character practice that I could see. Still in beta. Here it is if you'd like to try: http://lingt.com/

heard of it elsewhere but finally looked at it...

i guess it adds some value beyond just an online Anki or whatever (achievements, levels, etc.) and because of the default system it would be nice to start it as a beginner...

Their textbook list is not large and I feel like if I wanted to make my own custom list I might as well go all the way and do it in Anki where I can customize it more and review sentences, etc.

Still, competition is usually good and I hope that they are able to help people learn Chinese faster :)

I went through the first couple of their lists and it seems like they did a really great job implementing the rewards system. The interface was very fluid and well built as well. It looks promises but I noticed several things that seemed to take away from actually learning new things, rather than just reviewing previously familiar terms.

The timer almost pushes people to move too quickly. It doesn't slow down and allow the user to properly study new material. I went through the first couple lists okay, but that was only because I already knew all of the terms.

The really cool thing mentioned on the front of the site was voice recognition. First off, by the time the java applet loads the timer has already counted down nearly half way! It doesn't distinguish very well between sounds that are slightly similar. For example, I said "sen" instead of "qian" and it said it was correct everytime. It only noticed it was wrong when I said "ren". It also didn't matter what tone I used, it was always correct.

Definitely a cool looking site, but as mentioned above it just feels like a glorified Anki application. I would still rather just export into Anki from Skritter and then customize my desk from there. I'm curious to see what other people have to say about it.

The only thing I liked was the (SRS) pinyin practise. What I did not like is when a character is shown you can pick from 5/6 options the right definition. This allows for getting to the right answers through elimination ; not sure if you learn a lot in that case. I'd rather have a clear know or don't know when I practise.

The voice recognition wasn't very good. It's a good idea but needs a lot of work

I've had a try, although I want to play around with it some more. For a start, I think it's really good. (If you saw us when we first started, you'd probably have run away.) I bet they will improve it a lot. And the design is already prettier than ours.

The voice recognition, though, seems to be an outside technology they're using, which probably means they won't be able to improve it. I doubt it was designed for this purpose, either, so it's kind of liking using a dictionary-lookup handwriting recognizer to grade your writing. Because you know what they should be trying to say, there's a lot of information there that it's not built to utilize. And it doesn't care about tones at all, it seems.

Just makes me want to work on voice recognition for Skritter. We could make something a lot better than that, and it would be totally sweet. I imagine they can, too, but I'm not sure if they will go to the trouble to make their own thing, especially if they're planning on expanding to other languages sooner rather than focusing on Chinese.

Awesome, Nick. I was secretly hoping looking at something like that would push you guys on some of those features.

;o)

it's a good site, a nice addition to skritter, i have become quasi addicted after two days, not as efficient i think, but good to keep on reviewing vocabulary.

the rewards system is cool but i maxed out on almost all of the stats after two weeks or something.

also not really very intensive learning, like I said just a good review tool, the first prompt for a word is way too easy and after you can remember it until the fourth prompt, even with seven to 10 items in the quueue