I took a semester of Thai when I was in college to prepare me for studying abroad. I was averaging a 3.8 GPA at the time so I thought it would be another class I could put on cruise control. I was wrong. Instead, it was the worst academic experience of my life. The class was credit/no credit and I wouldn’t even get a credit.

The problem I had was that I was memorizing useless transliterations – like Pinyin for Thai – to pass the quizzes. This was fine for the first couple of weeks but then it suddenly became apparent: I wasn’t learning anything valuable. Nobody in Thailand could read what I was writing; I couldn’t even read what I was writing. By the time I figured out that I had to use brute memorization to learn their alphabet – actually an abugida – to get anywhere, it was already too late. I had fallen too far behind.

The experience itself was invaluable – even though ego took a beating – and I did learn an important lesson: Learn the native script.

BTW: Thai shares some vocabulary with Mandarin.

I am not sure whether this was an invitation for us all to contribute things we wished we had known, but I guess it was, so here goes:

In Skritter you can grade a character by doing 1-3 on your numpad, even for characters you have not written yet. This allows you to skip writing 好 or 學 for the umptieth time.

Great hint,Skritterjohan.It makes me really faster.

I wish I'd known about spaced repetition when I was in school. I would have thrown all sorts of things into Anki and remembered the stuff I spent so much time learning in classes rather than forgetting it all five seconds after the class ended.

Nick +2

Yeah SRS really rocks.

Are schools beginning to use SRS? I studied Chinese for 5 years in a school setting and I honestly think that I could have learned the same amount of characters with skritter in a couple months.

"Are schools beginning to use SRS?"
In depends on your definition of "SRS". Educational philosophy varies among school districts and between countries but I think most do some version of it. It just might not be to the level of sophistication and detail that Skritter taken it to.

"I studied Chinese for 5 years in a school setting and I honestly think that I could have learned the same amount of characters with skritter in a couple months."

Maybe you just weren't a good student? Don't get me wrong -- especially since I agree with your statement -- but I do wonder if I am losing something by not being in front of a live Chinese person. I have learned a lot of characters lately but that's just one dimension of the culture. There are intangibles -- like interacting with Chinese students -- that you can't get by sitting in front of a computer.

@icecream If there aren't many Chinese people who live near you, you can find language exchange partners pretty easily on the Internet (using Skype or whatever).

@pharchik I believe some schools are starting to look into it.

My main goal is to be able to read Chinese characters not to communicate with Chinese people. I was just trying to show a different perspective.

Japanese girls > Chinese girls

@icecream

Let us 实事求是, let us use techniques of 科学发展 to test your hypothesis.

Your hypothesis:
H0: "Japanese girls > Chinese girls"

According to http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16334998, urban Chinese females, 17 years old, have an average height of 1.586 m (5 ft 2 1⁄2 in). Japanese females, 19 years old, have a height of 1.580 m (5 ft 2 in) (http://www.mext.go.jp/b_menu/houdou/19/10/07092511/007/002.xls).

I would argue that, due to differences in sampling techniques and relatively small n, this difference is statistically insignificant. You may proceed with the calculation of a confidence interval.
Obviously, if there was any significance, it would show that the mean of Chinese young women's height exceeds the corresponding Japanese mean.

heh.

That's too funny... You have a point.

我觉得日本女孩比中国女孩漂亮

^^ I used Google translate to get that sentence. ^^

It looks right, and I recognize most of the characters, but I don't know if it translates into what I am trying to say: I think Japanese girls are prettier than Chinese girls.

@icecream: of course there are many dimensions to learning a language. That is why some of my Chinese teachers in the past "knew" 8000 words in english (for testing purposes) but couldn't understand or speak a lick. If you look at my post, I was referring specifically to the writing of characters. The countless hours of flash cards and scrap paper that could be done on skritter in minutes.