Hello guys :)

I just discovered Skritter and think about using it to learn how to write the Hanzi. Thing is, I started not too much ago with Chinese and am still a complete newbie with regard to the caracters.

I wanted to test Skritter to see if it fits my needs, and I got several question regarding the stroke orders:

1) Is there any way of getting the complete, correct or "standard" stroke order to see it as an animation, or is it just "try and error" and see if a blue stroke pops up, to know I was wrong?

2) In the demo, for example for 戈, it says: "And the last rule: "dots and minor strokes last." The upper-right dot in this character comes last.
But then, at the end of the demo, comes: diànhuà 电 话 and for the 话, it wants me to start with this dot, or minor strike, in the upper part of the character, first. So the last rule does not apply here?

3) Also, about the enclosure of some Hanzi, like 口 kǒu, the system does not recognize/criticise if I draw the final closing stroke from left to right or from right to left. How comes? I wonder if the system is more for advanced people who already dominate the stroke orders or if it is really appropriate for a newbie to learn how to draw from the scratch?

I mean, I do not want to learn wrong stroke orders just because Skritter does not care or does not correct me?

Thanks for your advice :-)

Welcome!

1) Hold down the "show" button (or "S") to see the stroke order animated, instead of normally pressing it to see it all at once. You can control the speed of animation from the settings menu while practicing.

2) In this case, as in most, the dot doesn't count as a "dot or minor stroke". It's only a few types of rogue dots that this applies to. Tricky! You just have to learn it. By the way, if you haven't seen this page, it's worth a look: http://www.skritter.com/stroke-order

3) For 口, it actually is giving you a "stroke backwards" message on that one, but it's overridden by the completion of the character (which can give a "Correct" message in the same place as the "stroke backwards" message). It's usually just on the last stroke that the message can be overriden. It also sometimes gives "should hook" messages. Recognition doesn't produce these messages all the time, but for easy ones like horizontals it will.

Hope this helps!

Skritter might take a little getting used to right now while you are getting started, but it should be an excellent tool for a newbie! I am jealous you have found it so early in your studies. If you stick with it, you'll be sailing past all your classmates in writing.

Ok, that sounds good =)

Think I will go for it. Thank you both for your kind answers!

Maybe you can give me one more advice: I read here on the board, that for an authentic writing experience, the wacom bamboo tablet would be the way to go.

Here in Spain, i can get the following ones:

Bamboo Pen Only, 9.8" x 6.9" (249mm x 175mm)
Bamboo Pen&Touch, small: 9.8" x 6.9" - 249mm x 175mm
Bamboo Pen&Touch, medium: Inch I don't know, but 337 x 223 x 8,5 mm

Is the smaller one sufficient, or even better, than the medium one?
Is it worth another 20 € to get a "touch"-tablet?

Another question to Arp: Would you advise me to first build my vocabulary with pynyin and try to memorize some basic characters, and then at a later stage concentrate on drawing them? Or should I also practice the drawing already, even without knowing what the symbols mean?
You see, I am really at the beginning and still trying to find out which is the way to go ;-)

Bamboo Pen only is fine for Skritter. Don't need larger, don't need touch.

If you're a complete newbie I'd say concentrate on listening and speaking to begin with. Listen to some CDs, have some lessons with a native speaker. Get to grips with the correct pronunciation of pinyin, basic vocab, sentence structure...

Reading and writing is important, but you do need a grasp of the language first. Otherwise you're be fumbling around, not sure what's what. I'd suggest just learning a few characters to begin with. Make sure that by the time you really want to learn words you've got some of the basic characters down.

Perhaps have a look at the list of radicals on Skritter. You don't need to know them 100% (I personally gave up some of the way through), but it'll give you a decent foundation of how characters are built. It might be worth assigning characters, or images to the different radicals to help you remember, and help you in the future.

If you have all the time in the world, you might want to study just characters for a while (eg. Heisig's list), but you're Chinese really wont improve while doing this. If it's more casual, or you're also working, maybe do a bit of this, but generally just add words as you come across them.

Chinesepod is another pretty good resource. Have look.

To echo Byzanti, you're going to want to use the stylus with Skritter. The touch functionality might be fun if you use the tablet to do other work on your computer, but the pen should be fine for most of that as well.

As for reading vs. writing - you'll learn the character much better if you write it, rather than just reading it. However you choose to integrate characters into your study of Chinese (Byzanti outlines a few methods above), I would recommend writing the characters that you intend to learn rather than just reading them. Additionally, the very beginning of learning to write can be somewhat difficult, I would recommend starting off with a set of simple characters to build basic writing skills, learning to write them correctly, and then drilling them on paper for a while until they feel natural. A decent progression might look something like this: 一，二，三，十，口，日，了，子，人，文，这。。。 The reason for this is that writing characters can be very hard if you don't know how to do it properly, but, once you learn to determine strokes and stroke order, writing becomes much easier and much more fun. I remember one time I tried to write the name of the city I lived in (荆州) from a printed copy, with no character training. When I finished, I asked a Chinese friend how I had done, and she just shook her head in disgust and told me it was wrong.

Yes, those are also the characters I was thinking about learning first...

I think I'll start with the writing in summer holiday, then :)

Will keep you informed! Thanks for all the good advice.