All of us here have one thing in common: We are all using skritter to improve our Chinese. Besides from that, we might all be as different as night and day.

I think it would be really interesting to learn a little bit more about my fellow skritterers, where you're from, why you learn chinese, how old you are etc. I will go first and tell you a little about myself, and I hope that you guys will keep it going :D


I'm a 28 year old guy from Sweden. I went to China after highschool in 2002 to learn wingchun kungfu fulltime, but then I met a girl (that couldn't speak english) and that really inspired me to learn chinese.
I took some beginners courses, and I found out that I really liked the challenge of learning this new language, and after 2 years I decided to go all in and signed up for a 4 year undergraduate course at 中山大学 in guangzhou. I graduated in 2009, and came back to sweden in 2010 to figure out what to do with my life (I still dont know^^). I have been looking for a tool to study chinese and tried several programs like ZDT and Anki. Started to use skritter a few months ago, and I really like it!


Now, lets keep it going people. Take a pause in your studies to introduce yourselves!

Nice thread. My name is Kristian and I'm also from Sweden. I've been studying Mandarin since I was 19 years old and I'm now 22. As the naive and ignorant fellow I was in the beginning, I truly believed that Chinese wouldn't be that difficult to master. But boy was I mistaken.

I enrolled at Gothenburg university year 2009 and combined studies of phonetics and Chinese Mandarin. My love for the Chinese culture and language grew as my knowledge accumulated, much thanks to my amazing teachers. They inspired me to continue to pursue learning Chinese and maybe reach a comfortable level of proficiency in the future.

I realized however that the few lectures and isolated occasions for me to use Chinese would not be sufficient to progress quick enough. This led to a few drastic measures, I altered my life in favor of language studies and immersion. Basically, I stopped partying as much (Swedish students tend to party a lot), started to socialize with Chinese people and watch Chinese TV-programs etc. These efforts lead to me initiating a relationship with a Chinese girl that I've been together with for more than a year now. Her name is 琳琳王 and she's from 威海, which by the way is a wonderful coastal city that I recommend visiting.

I must say that I've been greatly spoiled with the amount of "Chinese exposure" lately. With the amount of Chinese friends and acquaintances I have, I use Chinese more often than Swedish or English. But I still live in Sweden, which obviously is not the optimal environment for Chinese studies. So hopefully next year, I will study business administration in China, as the university I'm currently at offers this opportunity.

That's all for now, next! :)

Take a couple of languages, mix in some international law add some business and you'll get yourself a rough mixture of me.

All that short is an "adrenaline junkie" label.

Last year I finished my BA in Languages. Some antique and some modern. Halfway through it, I added Mandarin for obvious reasons. I am not so a big fan of the culture. It is also not my favorite language, although I love to Skritter. Of the 7 languages I studied, Spanish is the most to my liking, apart from my mother language, Afrikaans, that is.

Currently I am studying Commerce Law. When finished I hope to work for an international company or government with trade negotiations.

I teach part time to save some money to get married. That is, if I can convince my girlfriend's father, that I am not so bad. We want to get engaged...

I am fortunate enough to live in South Africa, an amazingly beautiful country, with an idiot for president and monkeys for advisors and ministers.

Oh yes, I am 23.

@Kristian
Kul med en till Svensk! Finding a Chinese girlfriend is definitely the fastest way of learning the language ^^ I hope you will be able to study in China next year!

@aharlekyn
Wow! Languages, international law and business! Thats one powerful mixture you got there! I see a bright future ahead of you!

@Everyone else

Lets keep it going people!

I moved to 湖北荆州 at the beginning of 2007, half a year after graduating college, to teach English with a college buddy. When I got here, I knew nothing, and I didn't learn much in my first year; even though it was the ideal opportunity to learn Chinese (I taught as little as 8 class hours a week). After a year in 荆州, I had to go back to the States to try to find a "real job", since I couldn't make my basic student loan payments on my Chinese salary.

After a couple months of living in my grandma's house and waiting for all of the paperwork for my temporary substitute teaching application to go through, I got itchy, so I picked up Tuttle's "Learning Chinese Characters" and started spending about three hours a day in a coffee shop drinking endless refills of $1.50 decaf (I can't do much caffeine - it wreaks havok on my body), just sitting down and studying characters, many for words I knew from my year in China, many that I didn't know at all. I learned about 500 characters in the next few months by brute force memorization with handmade flashcards, a dozen razor sharp pencils that I switched out when they started to dull a little, and, marvelously, only a single pocket-size, 90 page Five-Star notebook.

Anyway, after several more months and no luck finding a job that was anywhere resembling halfway-decent, I decided to toss my cards back in the China thing. I found a great job teaching English in a kindergarten in 武汉 (where a number of my friends from the 荆州 days were living), and I've been there, with the exception of 暑假 and 寒假, for almost three years now. I love it, and I hate it, but even when I feel the later more than the former, I remind myself that I've got a great job that pays me an unconscionable amount of money, considering where I live, to do something that I really enjoy, and that's not something to take for granted.

Oh, and I discovered Skritter through a friend and fellow student at Kunming's Keats School during the Spring Festival of 2010 where I went to fill in some of the considerable gaps in my largely osmosis-taught Chinese, certainly one of the most oddly-named Chinese schools in China, but I had a great experience there - the teachers were really great and the intensive one-on-one instruction, while expensive, wasted little time on stuff I already knew.

Well, let's continue this nice "Swedish" thread with yet another one. My name is Mathias and I am probably twice the age of most other here with my 44 years. I did actually learn Chinese in China a long time ago and that where an experience. A once in an million accident later and I am struggling to get my brain to reconnect to the words and characters in there. I have found it easier to learn it from start again. Probably spend many times the amount of time other do on this but I do this mostly for fun anyway. And yes, I do have a Chines wife since ages back and we do have two children with one of them in Chinese grade 1 in Hangzhou China. She is actually learning me more Chinese than my wife have done during all those year;-) A lot of my vocabulary now is therefore from comics and TV shows. I live in Japan and even though it is traditional characters and a different language i still get surprisingly lot of training reading characters in my daily life. I work as an IT architect and are currently struggling to take part in an large project to "translate" all source code and data from an old Hitachi mainframe to an IBM mainframe. You never know when you will get use of your knowledge in code pages. If things go well here we move on to China, probably Shanghai or Tianjin in September for some 3 years of work there. For the moment i weekend commute to China from Japan so that will be nice and help my Chinese. I have been using Skritter since it where in beta phase but during another account. Skritter, Chinesepod and my oldest daughter are my primary sources for learning Chinese. For anyone wondering if it is worth the time to learn Chinese, I can truthfully say YES. Chinese have given me many fun and interesting job opportunities over the years and I still get weekly proposals for jobs via Linkedin. You never know how it will help but it will, one way or the other. Part of why I have my current work is thanks to my Chinese. My current IT work have nothing to do with Chinese (yet) but just my efforts to learn Chinese where enough to convince my employer that I had the skills to learn new things and work hard.

I like reading people's Chinese stories - thanks folks. Did you know, if you send them to George he will put them in the Skritter newsletter, so more people can see them. (Mine has already been in).

I started learning Mandarin 5 years ago, and I’m just about past the “beginner” stage. It would be easy to become discouraged by reading how well some people are progressing, so I thought you might like to know you are not the slowest.
I learnt French at school, but only to age 16. I know enough French to go shopping, but not enough to have an interesting conversation. This has bothered me for years, whenever I meet a European who speaks beautiful English, so when I had children I wanted to ensure that they learned a second language properly. I could have started with French, but I thought there was a fair chance they would have to learn French at school, so I chose something less common. I dithered for a while between Chinese and Japanese, both of which sounded exotic and potentially useful. In the end I chose Chinese because I had read somewhere that “Chinese does not have verbs”, and I had wondered on and off how a language could possibly work without verbs. It’s all nonsense of course. They merely meant that the verbs don’t conjugate, which is not particularly interesting, but by the time I worked that out we were hooked.
I’ve not been to China. Obviously I’d like to go, but not yet. I think I could cope with buying train tickets in Beijing now, so the idea is not terrifying, but I reckon we’d get a lot more out of the trip in another few years.
When I watch my children learning Mandarin I realise how old I am. My memory is appalling compared with theirs, and they get their tongues
round the new sounds with total ease. I had a lot of trouble with the difference in sound between (pinyin) q and ch, and had to resort to descriptions like “aspirated voiceless palatal affricate”, which incidentally extended my English vocabulary. On the other hand, I learn grammatical rules and hanzi more easily than they do.
For three years we learned spoken Mandarin only, then once my children had mastered reading in English I decided to introduce some Chinese
characters. The simple primers were OK, but I wanted to read them a real book. Shouldn’t be too hard, you might think: find an easy toddler’s
book in Chinese, translate it in advance, write in the pinyin if necessary, how hard can it be? The hours I spent wrestling with a dictionary for characters that had to be there somewhere! I gave up. Now, having learnt 960 characters on Skritter (including all the radicals), I’m just about ready to try again. Unfortunately, the kids are so much older that a toddler’s book will no longer hold their attention.
My advice to anyone learning Chinese: try not to be in a hurry. Also, if a course or an approach isn’t working, leave it aside and try another one. There’s more than one way to skin a cat.

Rachael.

In 2006 I started dating an Australian girl, Cass, of Chinese extraction. I phrase it that way since she moved to Aus with her parents when she was 4, and is just as Australian as myself (Australian citizen, Australian accent, likes pork chops more than stir-fry, hardly even remembers living in china). Her parents however moved back to China after she graduated high school about a year before I met her, and she goes back about once a year to visit them in Shanghai.

About 2 years into the relationship with great fear and trepidation I went along with her. Turns out her parents are super nice, but very embarrassed by their English. After the initial awkward hello's at the airport, if they wanted to say anything longer than 1 or 2 words to me, they told Cass in Shanghainese and I would respond in English. It was great because I very quickly felt totally at home since I was just talking to Cass all the time, but also almost disappointing because I really wanted them to like me but couldn't really make a connection since everything went through Cass.

About 6 months before the next trip Cass and I got engaged. And I decided to learn Mandarin in secret. I downloaded a bunch of Chinesepod casts and listened to them while walking to work. At that stage I mostly just wanted to be able to say hi, and with nothing but those podcasts it was slow going but I managed to get about 20 useful sentences down pat, tones and all and surprised the hell out of her parents next trip. Due to the fact they naturally talk shanghainese I still understood 0% of what was going on, but they seemed to appreciate the gesture.

So I got back from that trip, having asked a shopkeeper 多少钱?, and then understanding him when he said 八十. I figured I'd actually try. Got heisige, pimslure, scritter and pleco and away I went. I'm not learning to impress Cass's family anymore, now I just enjoy it.

Ironically Cass is almost no help though since her mandarin is pretty poor and she keeps trying to use shanghainese tones/words which just makes me more confused :P

It's really interesting to read your stories! Lets keep it up!
It would be really cool if the admins could tell us a little about them selves too.

Started learning Chinese a few years ago.
Was allowed to do a chinese class for free (staff) at the uni I work at (also student Physics and Computer Systems Engineering). Unfortunately didn't get the chance to keep studying Chinese.

Started learning again last year doing a TAFE college course.Got put in a class with Chinese background speakers and did certificate 1 in six months instead of the usual year. Doing certificate 2 at the moment
(9 weeks left) pass this and start cert3 next semester
(have to do that over a year).

Last girlfriend was Canadaian chinese and didn't speak a word of chinese.

Been using the chineseclass101 , chinapod and others to get enough listening practise.

Once I've finished my degree(Eng and Sci double) want to do some travelling around China.

No female skritterers so far?

@DaXia Rachael is!

Good thread, DaXia!

I took three years of Chinese in college (Oberlin, Ohio). I don't remember why I started, but I remember that after I got about halfway through my first semester, I had put so much effort into it that I couldn't quit, or it would all be wasted!

I wanted to build Skritter because there wasn't any other way for me to keep up with my characters, both when I was in school and especially after I finished. I relied on being pushed to learn new characters faster than I forgot old ones, but once all that pushing had to come from me, I couldn't hack it. I needed something like Skritter to take care of all the structure for me so that all I had to do was show up to study.

It's not that I was bad at learning characters, just that I was bad at discipline. I couldn't bring myself to study regularly when I knew how inefficient my practice methods were. When I learned about SuperMemo and Anki and other spaced repetition systems, I had already started building Skritter, or else I might have settled for a non-Chinese-specific SRS.

George, Scott, and I are all twenty-five. We started Skritter after having lived together in college. My girlfriend, Chloe, speaks Chinese, but since it was mostly Shanghainese at home, my Mandarin is slightly better than hers. Doesn't stop her from complaining about it whenever I try to say something too complicated in Chinese, though!

There's a little more about us here:
http://www.skritter.com/about

Nice thread! It's interesting to hear about other people's connections and reasons for learning Chinese.

Myself I studied Japanese at university for several years, including a year on exchange (EDIT: I'm 28 and Australian). After many years of struggling to become actually fluent I found www.ajatt.com, which inspired me to go all out for immersion. Apart from work all I did in 2010 was listen to/read/watch Japanese (with a bit of speaking and writing of course). This made all the difference in the world. Currently I am a research student at the university of Kyoto. I hope to pass an exam in February that will allow me to begin a masters in philosophy.

I still have a lot of work to do to bring up my reading and writing skills to a post grad level, but I feel confident enough now to learn modern Chinese a bit on the side each day. Along with Skritter (currently at 840 汉子) I also use Anki (iPhone app is great) incorporating sound files from www.zhongwenred.com. I also enjoy films with mandarin subtitles and listening to radio programs/music in Chinese. I'm looking forward to slowly growing my ability over the next several years, with the intention of ramping up immersion if I get a break from my studies to do so.

@Mike
Wow! Nice stats!!! 4k chars and 7k words O_O

Hi all, my name is Christopher and I recently turned 20. I currently live in La Mirada near Los Angeles, California. I am a dual citizen, French and American. I grew up 16 years in France and then went to New Mexico for a year of high school, which is where I met my ex-girlfriend who is originally from 成都.

In my family we have always had a passion for languages, my mother speaks 7 languages, my brother is fluent Japanese (married to a Japanese wife too) and we all speak English, French and Dutch (although I could say my Chinese is better than my Dutch today).

I first started learning Korean, but as most of you may guess the Sichuanese girl quickly made me switch to Chinese. Before I keep going on, though, I need to emphasize that I am not learning Chinese just because of a girl -- I was searching for a language that would confirm my passion, and that was Chinese. Chinese won over my heart and did indeed confirm my passion, it was like "the one". I started studying slowly and took at class at my community college; at the time I majored in computer programming, but a job as lead programmer convinced me that it wasn't my future. I then decided to major in Chinese studies; I decided to learn about the language and its cultures as much as I could.

When it comes to studying, though, I get easily discouraged. Not discouraged as in giving up, but I feel that I should be learning much faster (because I intend to make it my major once I transfer to a 4-year university). I get discouraged when seeing that some people make insane progress amid having a real busy life. It's true that I haven't had the chance to take a chinese class for the past year as I have to complete my lower division GE classes, and that I've never had the chance to visit ASIA ! :(
However, despite this, I still have great passion for chinese and I feel like I could spend the entire day studying anything related to it. I also want to learn a dialect, but I think I will start on that once I go to China or Taiwan.

Currently I am studying at Cypress college in Cypress, CA. I have another year until I transfer to either UCLA or CSULB. I work at a hotel as a front desk receptionist during the weekend night shifts. My girlfriend today is from 高雄, we get to speak english, french and chinese so that's great! I am planning to visit Taiwan and Japan this coming winter, too!

@DaXia nice thread. How about also putting a brief description in your profile? @Kristian too?

I won't repeat my profile description in this thread. I'll just add that my Chinese name is 卡福凱, my favorite character is 道, and my least favorite character is 濟 (but that will change).

Oh right! My chinese name is 歐陽軒

After becoming fluent in Spanish during my college years, I kept looking for my next language. I started with Hindi, Bangla and Portuguese, but never stayed with any of them for long.

When I started working for a biotech company, at the time we had a virtual office, so I was able to live with my parents in Nanning, China for two years. I was back in the states for two years, but then I worked things out with my company so that I could work part-time and live in Asia, and have time to write. I'm trying to get started right now as a comic book writer, and should have my first book finished by the end of the year. I live mostly in Taitung (Taidong) Taiwan. It's an amazing place, a center for aboriginal culture in Taiwan, and right between coastal mountains and the Pacific Ocean.

I also spend lots of time traveling in Malaysia, Indonesia and Mainland China. I've learned a fair amount of Indonesian/Malaysian and a bit of Japanese. I consider my second home in Asia to be West Sumatra, Indonesia. The Minangkabau culture is fascinating - on the outside it appears to be a very conservative Muslim culture, and it is, but at the same time it is the most populous matriarchal culture in the world.

When I was back in the States, I was frustrated by the inefficiency of review - I'd completed the first four volumes of the New Practical Chinese Reader and countless other supplementary materials, but was I supposed to slog through and drill myself on a chapter a day? Then I stumbled on Skritter and then Anki, and it's made a huge difference. I know that studying Indonesian and Japanese has been so much more of a pleasure using SRS software. So I was a user of Skritter for a year before I started handling corrections and related stuff here at skritter.

My reading level and number of characters has been progressing steadily, but as disciplined as I've been at writing in English, I've really slacked as far as writing compositions in Chinese! But I have a language exchange deal with a guy who's going to Canada soon, and he even has a certificate in teaching Chinese as a foreign language. I wrote a composition last week, but none so far this week. It's Sunday, so I'd better get cracking!

Correction - the Minangkabau are matrilineal, not matriarchal.