Hey all!

JohnP (creator of Sinosplice and host on ChinesePOD) mentioned this site a little while ago in one of his blog posts. It is a great site that I have been using over the last week to learn, practise and reinforce my Chinese character skills.

It is currently in the beta stages of development, which also means that it is currently free to use!! :) You can try it out without creating an account but if you do create an account, you can select your vocab list to learn from and also track your progress on a daily basis.

I could try to explain how easy it is to use and do an indepth review of the site but it's easier just for you to go and check it out yourselves. Trust me.. it's really, really good for all levels of learning. The vocab list I am using at the moment is called "integrated chinese", which is all commonly used characters and words. It also has the HSK Level 1 vocab list loaded on there as well.

A good thing about it is that it also allows you to learn the tones for the characters at the same time, and you can even listen to samples of how each character is spoken. I hope that one day ChinesePOD will incorporate a tool like this into their own site. Until then however...

http://www.skritter.com/

Click the image for a larger picture.

This should be an interesting piece of news for anyone struggling with writing characters:

http://blog.skritter.com/2009/04/chinesepod-new-lists-users-guide-launch.html

http://blog.skritter.com/2009/08/teaming-up-with-chinesepod.html

!!!!

Hey, guys.

Just a quick note to let you know that the free Skritter integration (we call it "Skritter Lite") is now live.  Premium and above subscribers can see it by going to either (1) the Vocab Manager (click on "Me" at the top, then "Vocabulary"), where there is now a "Writing Practice" link, or (2) from individual Lesson pages, on the Vocabulary tabs (select words to practice, then click on the new "Writing Practice" button).

I will do a blog post about this soon.

Question to CPod development staff:

So the Skritter plugin still says it's "Skitter Lite" and that there will be a more full-featured version in the future. Will this future version have the ability to get the words and definitions straight from the vocab list instead of importing them from the Skritter database? I'm studying the pirate lesson and half of the words I added are not in the Skritter database, which is kind of annoying. Also, when you do get the words, sometimes the Skritter definition differs from the usage in the dialogue, which makes it a bit tricky to use Skritter to memorize the vocab.

Any other light that can be shed on the differences between "Skritter Lite" and the future version would be sweet, too.