Hello Skritter HQ

In a distracted moment am wondering how large the community has grown?

How many members have signed up?
How many are active? (maybe interesting to see how it splits into forum users and those that have clocked say 5 hours in the last week or at least 15 in the last month, etc)

Where is everyone from?
How many are preparing for an actual exam? eg hsk?

Anyone have other ponderings to add?

Sometimes when I go to the supermarket I ask the store manager to provide me with a sales report, average basket etc. Other days I just buy the stuff I need.

Please delete this post if you feel I'm not friendly enough or should mind my own business. :-)

mw, that's because supermarkets don't have community forums. Skritter does :-)

smhon, I'm originally from Canada; I now live with my wife in Chengdu. No exams to prepare for except for that of life (and a career) in China.

I manage 20-30 minutes a day on Skritter.

Yikes - 5 hours in the last week? Okay, so it's manageable, but I think most of us log more like 2-3, especially considering that that usually translates to 4-5 hours real-time...

On to the other stuff...

I'm an American expat in Wuhan, fourth year in China, third here (first was in Jingzhou, about three hours west of here). I'm not "preparing" for any exam, but I do hope to reach a level where I'm comfortable taking a mid- to high-level HSK, though the test is way less important than the language ability itself.

@mw Not to try to slam you or anything, but the topic of this thread isn't about sales reports. Where users are from, and why they're using Skritter have nothing to do with Skritter's sales/income. Not a good analogy, no offence.

I spent a long time with a Skritter account I never used. I recently decided to really focus on learning to write rather than just read 汉字and to greatly expand my vocabulary. These days I am spending about 90 minutes a day (as recorded by Skritter) practicing here.

I live in the US but am currently in Kunming where I am studying Chinese.

@murrayjames What line of work are you in, if you don't mind me asking.

I'm an American, just out of college with a degree in Chinese. Now unemployed :)

It's true that we won't reveal user numbers, but we do reveal usage numbers. You can see how much time is spent and how many items are studied each month at the top of the newsletters. Big increases last couple months!

I don't think most users are preparing for HSK/JLPT, actually. Some certainly are, but it's not a huge fraction.

Bohan, don't mind at all. I'm a musician. Although I live in China, I'm currently writing a PhD diss. in music for New York University. I play saxophone.

I'm a British expat currently teaching law at a university in Tokyo during term time and running university residential courses for Japanese students in the UK during the holidays. I also used to teach at a university in Beijing and intend to go back there one day.

I use Skritter when I get fed up doing my research or want to procrastinate doing the washing up or something.

I am studying both languages primarily because it makes life easier -- when you have an admin department that gives you a new, ever more complex, handwritten form to fill in every week, or when the gas man pops round and needs you to authorise this or that, it is useful to be able to handwrite characters and quite humiliating when you can't.

I have zero interest in the exams, just in improving my success rate in various social/work related situations.

I'm living in the Netherlands. Haven't done a lot on Skritter in the previous 6-7 weeks due to bizz travel and holidays, but normally I daily do about 30 minutes of Skritter time. I might give HSK 3/4 a try early 2011, more to find out how good/bad my Chinese is than going for a certificate.

I'm American, a computer programmer, I've never been to China, and I live in New York City. I recently came back from a two-month hiatus and since then I've averaging a little less than an hour a day. I'm not preparing for an exam, I'm just a language nut; I also speak Spanish and am studying Russian and Portuguese.

I started studying simplified characters but then realized that many of the characters seen in New York City are traditional, because of the highly-mixed Chinese population here; we have Chinese people from all over, not just mainland China, and some of them came a long time ago. So, with some gnashing of teeth I switched to the "both" option which has definitely slowed things down but in many ways has deepened the practice.

James

I'm living in the Netherlands too. Took a small university course in Chinese for two years, then studied, worked and traveled for half a year in Taiwan and then did the same again for about a year in China. After, I came back to the Netherlands to graduate university; working on that right now.

I Skritter for about 84.9 minutes per day on average (that's 28.3 hours in the 20 days I've been *using* so far; just hit the 1300 character writings learned mark today) and I'm hoping to pass some-yet-to-be-determined level of HSK soon; never paid any serious attention to it but I guess it'll look nice on my resume. Most of these characters I've written before from time to time, but I just suck at recalling them when I need them.

Started out learning traditional characters, but switched over last year 'cause all my movies, books and friends are simplified. :P

James, I see the same thing in Toronto (Canada), so I'm thinking of starting to add traditional too (for recognition purposes only)....

I've just started to skritter. I'm doing about 1-2 hours a day.

I'm economics student from Poland who is taking JLPT N4 this year but I'm already prepared so I need skritter only to repeat material.

Skritter is a exellent way to practise kanji. Thats why I'm here.

@Bohan

From an old post two weeks ago...

"@icecream You're right, I am young. I'm in 7th grade right now.

You think Kanji complements the other two scripts? In what way? Seems like an incomplete answer. What you just wrote was more philosophical then anything else. Thanks anyway!

Now...

@murrayjames What line of work are you in, if you don't mind me asking.

I'm an American, just out of college with a degree in Chinese. Now unemployed :)"

Will the real Bohan please stand up?

Personally, I'm fine. I also plan on being anonymous.

@ Icecream - Thanks for saying that. I also remembered that post. I wasn't going to call him/her on it, but I was also very confused.

@smhon

Here's the community statistics I found:

https://docs.google.com/leaf?id=0BzO4_P0Gx_aJMjBhYjkzMTgtNjFlNC00NTdiLWE3YzctMWI1OGQxYjliZGVk&hl=en&authkey=CJWTlZYL

- The number of learned characters decreased between March and July? Probably a technical/structural change in Skritter.

- Average retention fell two percent when 2010 started and has been floating around 90% afterwards. Probably another technical/structural change in Skritter.

- As you can see on the basis of hours spent, items studied and characters learned, Skritter only had a slight growth since the beginning of the year but has been booming since July. Related to this is the enormous number of unique hits that Skritter had in that period (increased advertising?):

https://docs.google.com/leaf?id=0BzO4_P0Gx_aJMDNjZmE1ZDYtMGJlYi00M2YzLTlmNTQtOTVkODNmNTc2ZmE1&hl=en&authkey=CLm5tcAN

How many members signed up is anyone's guess since those statistics aren't publicly available, however, there was a 58.7% increase in the amount of hours spent between July and now, and a more or less similar increase in the amount of members is likely.

Compete numbers are exceedingly inaccurate, as is usual. We enabled hidden reading mode in January, which might account for the retention drop. Characters learned change might have been due to a change on emphasis from character writing to including reading prompts, having definition prompts on be default, including mnemonics and decomps, etc.

Wow, glad to see a random musing was able to generate such interest :-)

My time on skritter is a bit erratic but my personal goal is to clock 20-30 mins 5 days a week. Got a long way more to go in terms of learning the language and reckon the magic number for me will be 3,000 characters.

I would like at some point to take a test (HSK?) to measure ability, but for now the New Chinese Practical Reader has me occupied. I've gotten to book 3 this year and now have gone back to revise the previous books especially the grammar and memorising the vocabulary.

I'm currently living in Singapore.


p.s. Thanks to all of you who replied and shared a little about yourself. Makes the community.