Rest assured, there's someone whose Skritter strokes are even uglier than yours:

Link: http://img210.imageshack.us/img210/5649/skritterstrokes.gif (using the new Ctrl+Alt+D functionality)

Three major issues that influence the way I write:

(1) I got used to different ways of simplifying strokes that still comply with the script recognition.

(2) Sometimes exaggerating a strokes is needed for immediate recognition, so I tend to exaggerate certain types of strokes.

(3) My method of using a touchpad on a laptop is probably quite unique.

What do your strokes look like? Has Skritter helped to established a new Chinese handwriting font style?

Wow... a touchpad? Have you got it configured so it works like a Wacom, where the cursor is based on your position on the touchpad (if that can be done...), or is it in regular mouse mode? That would be a nightmare in mouse mode...

I suppose the real question is - how does your actual handwriting look? There's been some discussion in the 'Skritter, your handwriting, and you' thread about Skritter's effect on handwriting, but I've found that Skrittering hasn't had much of an effect on my handwriting, just on my retention, but that's after about two and a half years of studying characters by rote repetition (though infrequently), so my handwriting was already fairly well established when I started using Skritter.

Sweet Jeeeeeezus...

Ummm, maybe we are becoming bi-graphical; we write Skritterese shorthand and also Chinese. How about a screenshot of your best efforts with pen and paper?

A while back I posted my fear about Skritter deteriorating my handwriting, and the idea did not find much support, but now others seem to be expressing similar concerns. Anyway, since my main goal is reading and not calligraphy I am not to concerned at this point. Still, the Ctrl-Alt-D option is a welcome feature.

I use my touchpad in standard mouse mode + left-click.

To me, Skritter is about memorizing strokes, not about learning how to write good-looking characters.
One day, I'd like to switch to cursive script anyway ...

Note to self: actually I guess it would not be a "screenshot" if it were pen and paper!

I am curious to see what impact the ghostly traces of our "real" handwriting has on the way people use Skritter.

In the era before Skritter I had also tried the pen and paper "trace the characters" and and copy them 10 to the nth times, so as a pseudo beginner can not really take my experience as representative.

@podster: OK, here's mine. I just did the first one that came up in Skritter, which happened to be a word I knew well, and then wrote it by hand without thinking about it too hard, so this is *not* my best effort, this is more like my typical effort. It wouldn't win any calligraphy competitions but clearly shows that my actual handwriting is much better than my Skritter writing:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/jww1066/4588478051/

And on Skritter:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/jww1066/4588478039/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/jww1066/4589098546/

> Rest assured, there's someone whose Skritter strokes are
> even uglier than yours:

Holy crap, you're not wrong! I'm feeling sorry for the Skritter stroke recogniser right about now... :-)

I use a touchpad on a laptop also. Is that really so unusual?

Well, it seems rather slow and inconvenient... I guess a touchpad might be about as good as a mouse, but then, I hate using the mouse with Skritter.

@jmw1066,
Interesting. Your handwriting is definitely legible. I would have guessed that for some people the Skritter would look better because of the way it repositions each stroke to where it's supposed to be and thereby anchors subsequent strokes. I think what often really happens is that Skritter trains us go with what we can get by with. This is probably consistent with the advice to write as quickly as possible in Skritter without obsessing on aesthetics, and is probably one of the reason why Skritter is so pleasant and effective to use. Just not a complete solution for any aspiring calligrapher, and probably not a complete solution for total beginners. Thanks for posting that.

Agreed - Skritter is a great tool for studying reading and writing, but it's not very good for developing handwriting, and it shouldn't be. Handwriting is something that should be practiced by writing on paper, you need to see the strokes forming at the point of your pen, and you need to see exactly what you wrote, not a close approximation of it, and not an idealized representation of it. That's not to say that Skritter is absolutely worthless for developing handwriting, mind you, it does help build muscle memory, and it's a better tool for learning writing than using the stroke order IME on your Chinese cell phone, but it only part of a balanced writing diet.

As for calligraphy, I've always been told that the first thing to do is to divorce your calligraphy from your handwriting, treat it as art and not language, and the nuances of calligraphy strokes make Skritter a very poor tool for learning it.

I agree that the primary focus of Skritter is not developing *beautiful* handwriting, but it would be nice to know that the handwriting we are learning here is at least legible.

We have only one example (mine) of actual handwriting. Do other people have handwriting samples (as learned on Skritter) that they can share?

James

Just for you James,

http://tiny.cc/1f0og

(Excuse my poor grammar, corrections accepted!)

Hmmm, let's see:

"I myself have only used Skritter, no other. If your nose is very [???] that's called [????!?!?!]"

I think it's legible, although I couldn't figure out what the character after 很 was supposed to be.

James

I was getting to the corner of the letter back I was writing on！It's 堵. I'm not sure if you can even use this to describe your nose...

And, 齉

Here are my squigs:

http://picasaweb.google.com/Herma48852/Skritter?feat=directlink

Here is sample hanzi:

http://picasaweb.google.com/Herma48852/HanziSamples?feat=directlink

@heruilin that looks pretty excellent! Did you study calligraphy outside of Skritter?

James

@James no but I've been at for about six years on and off, first with Pimsleur (only audio), then Rosetta Stone and finally Chinesepod. With the latter, I would painstakingly write out each conversation in both simplified and traditional using MDBG samples as a guide (a well placed ad there brought me to Skritter). I find Skritter is much more fun and better fits into how I like to study .. short blasts of 5 to 10 minutes a few times a day.

As for my own hanzi, there is no doubt that it has improved since switching to Skritter. I don't try to rush through drawing my characters and about half the time I will also write the character on paper. This has really helped .. of course, I won't learn as many as fast as others but Skritter has seemed to tune into my slower pace and I am still making steady progress.

On the other hand, my Beijing wife's calligraphy is so beautiful its very hard for me to look at my scribbles without wanting to barf.