I've been toying around with the idea of adding my students' names to a Skritter list. However, I don't like the idea of throwing a busload of items into the Skritter database when they will be of no use to anybody but myself. I don't suppose there's a way to add vocabulary that is only used by my account, is there? That might be a distant feature idea, as I could see name lists like this as a relevant way to increase one's vocabulary, as well as giving some cultural insight into how Chinese names are chosen; in addition to the practical use of learning to write one's friends'/students'/colleagues' names.

Don't worry about space issues; we use Google's servers and they are pretty big so if it would be useful to you add it in.

The "standard" format is:
(a personal name)
e.g. for 尹东娥 the definition would be:
YǐnDōngÉ (a personal name)

Hmm, maybe I need in on the custom definitions alpha... I would want the definition field to say the English name of the person in question (since it's a dual-language school, so everybody has one), which is part of the reason I hadn't wanted to add them in.

I'll add you. When you create the names, do the personal name thing (although don't actually include the tones in the name, so's you can practice them: "Yin Dong'e (personal name)"). Later, you can use the custom definitions to add the English names back in.

With so many new characters you wont otherwise use, it might be less stressful just to stick them in Anki or somesuch.

Well, with my backlog after some recent computer issues, and the amount of vocab sources I'm trying to catch up with, I don't expect to get to the name thing for a while. I haven't ever used Anki, though, so trying to get started on that would probably be more work than trying to learn the characters of my students' names via Skritter. In the meantime, it's just nice to expand my knowledge of how I can make Skritter work in different situations.

@FatDragon do you have their pictures? Probably you would find it more useful to associate each student's face with their name. That can be done with Anki if you have image files.

My personal policy for just this sort of thing is two-fold. First, I add the individual characters from names into the "Names" section of one of my custom lists. Then, I take photos of each student and enter them with both their Chinese and English names into Anki. I've not kept up with the photo/name list this year, but plan to photograph my students during final oral exams and practice them this summer (since I anticipate having them again next year). Before my foray into the world of SRS, this was a real pain. But now it shouldn't be too much trouble.

I chose to do individual characters instead of whole names because I find that many hanzi used in names are also used elsewhere, and I didn't want to associate them only with a name. It's worked well so far, and time and many more names will show how well it works over the long haul.

@James - I teach in a kindergarten, so I know my students very well - pictures would slow me down in this case, not only because I don't have appropriate pictures for most of them, but because seeing their English names gives me a shorter step to recalling their Chinese names.

@Dert - Sounds like you've got a pretty good system going; I assume you're teaching in a university, so you've got a lot of students to remember and not enough time with them to learn all of their names socially. Personally, since my goal with this would be to increase my name-savvy and my knowledge of my students' names, with character learning secondary, I think I would personally choose to input their names in their entirety rather than the individual characters - that would help me to recognize characters that commonly occur in names， since many characters occur more frequently in names than elsewhere (婷 and 媛， for example).