It’s not a substitute for learning how to write characters by hand. I worked as a substitute teacher yesterday and saw a Chinese boy and a Korean girl teaching each other their respective languages. I joined in, of course, and showed them how to write them in the native script (they were both using roman letters). I realized, after a few abortive attempts, that I was unable to write ~95% of the characters I knew! I had no problem reading them (the Chinese boy knew how to write them); I just didn’t have the muscle memory encoded in my hands. Just a word of warning.

do you use a writing tablet?

No, that might be part of the problem. I use a mouse.

I would highly recommend getting a writing tablet-- its would nearly solve that problem entirely, but of course theres no alternative to a some actual pen and paper everyday as well. At the very least you can write 5x quicker on skritter, so you can study 5x more before you feel burned out, and i'm sure the repetitive clicking of the mouse has got to be annoying too!

if you do get the pad, imho, don't bother with the pen and touch, just get the pen. I bought the pen AND touch one and don't even use the touch feature, and it was twice as much, so i could have have been happy with the $50 one. (you can still use the pen as a mouse, and as your writing tool of course)

My friend works with a lot of japanese kids at a day care, and always brings back what they write. He gets to write with little kids and have them teach him things. I've never had that opportunity! You guys are lucky, that sounds like fun :P

there was a thread like this before, tablet + raw squigs is the closest you can get to handwriting, for me it's enough...

Raw squigs and the tablet have given me better handwriting in Chinese than I have in English.

Thats sooo not the biggest problem on skritter atm...actually its hardly even a problem at all.

I believe that the biggest problem here right now is the example sentences. That you cant make your own, and that there are no word examples for single characters. I believe that this is a serious flaw.

Daxia, you can edit the definition. Add the example sentence you want on a new line in there.

Pen only small Wacom FTW.
In addition to that, write about what you've done today or just make something up in a short 2 lines diary entry daily on paper and it will become normal to write characters completely from memory. After a while you won't have that uneasy feeling when it comes to a recall situation, which is half the battle. I need to do this more...

I think the most important thing is learning to write the individual components of characters by hand. Once you've had practice writing chinese characters on paper for a while and you get an understanding of strokes and stroke order, the important thing is simply remembering how to write the character. There are many characters that I have only practiced on skritter with a mouse, but when I go to write them on paper I have no problem. In fact one of my chinese teachers just praised my handwriting even though the majority of my practice is done using skritter.

The initial transfer to paper from computer is uncomfortable I admit. I use a pen and raw sqigs and was disappointed when I couldn't write certain characters at first. Then, after writing on paper 2 minutes a day for a week or so, I started to get really good quickly. Essentially, Skritter allows me to master the components of characters. Scaling is something you might miss out on Skritter though. Native speakers can make up a character and write it perfectly because size and scaling are so repetitive in Chinese. Write out some characters from your text book or work book and compare your sizes of each component. Don't copy print text characters, copy written text style ones. Skritter gets you 95% of the way to perfect beautiful characters. I have only been hand writing characters for two months(on paper) and write better than locals. When I go out to eat I write little notes on napkins, or use a pen and write something on a little paper for fun. Sure, I forget components sometimes, but don't think natives don't. Now I am told I write like a middle school girl. Sounds funny, but my English handwriting isn't nearly at that level. Locals still write much faster than I can, but then again, they write chicken scratch.

I've used a mouse for most of my time on Skritter and am able to translate that to paper (not always the prettiest handwriting, but still legible). I don't write a character as it being a single entity, but rather using it's components. Perhaps be more strict when grading yourself on writing?

The biggest problem with Scritter is not just the example sentences (which are a big problem), but the definitions. Many of the english definitions are not accurate, and the Chinese ones are seemingly non-existent. Also they don't for example say if the word is a noun/verb etc. Plus in my Chinese learners dictionary each entry says where the word is usually used in a sentence (predicate/subject etc). I would say this at least is very basic stuff since scritter is basically a writing dictionary. The writing part is fantastic, it's the other part that needs working on.

Also, I cant see why there shouldn't be Chinese definitions with the English definitions. Chinese defintions are very important, why are users being relied on to input them!?

All this means that basically it's a bad idea to use Scritter to learn new words (unless you want to double check the definition as you do so) which is a very big failing in my book.

Having said that it's still a fantastic tool and I wont be canceling my subscription anytime soon.

@Antimacassar, do you have a good Chinese-Chinese dictionary you would recommend? I'd like to see more Chinese definitions but most dictionary definitions are a page or so long, not too efficient when reading hundreds a session.

Skritter has it's place in the world of learning these languages, but we'll always have to use the vocab outside the box. I believe context is the only way to master vocabulary.

@Thomas. Hi. My learner's dictionary is published by Beijing Language and Culture University Press. It's called 学汉语用例词典. But I find that the 现代汉语小词典 is fine for many words (and also short definitions!). And of course nciku has Chinese entries for all their entries.

Thanks for the info, I'll be sure to take a look next time I'm in the city.

My biggest problem with skritter is that I have a full time job :P

@DaXia: It's on the list! Example sentences will be upgraded and made available for Japanese after the current set of list upgrades.

@Antimacassar: We have a dictionary basically, but it's optimized for studying, not for reference. The study page is very crowded as it is, so we go for definitions that are relatively compact. Parts of speech are asked for every so often so we may consider adding those later. Until we have a decent and free to use Chinese-Chinese dictionary, we can add it to our system, until then we're dependent on user submissions. Which, if you run into inaccurate definitions, you can submit a correction to us by editing the definition (clicking it) and checking the box, the more of those we get the better the dictionary will get. And you can use that feature if the definition we have doesn't match what you're trying to learn from that word.