Skritter
light487
December 04, 2008, 09:19 PM posted in General DiscussionHey 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.
calkins
December 05, 2008, 10:47 AMWow, this is a really powerful program! It even tells you when you have written a stroke backwards, when your curve should be a hook, etc. etc.
I've used other handwriting-recognition tools, but this one is really powerful because you get to learn the tone of the character and hear the audio pronunciation. The "progress" tab is pretty cool too.
Thanks for the great suggestion.
RJ
December 05, 2008, 12:22 PMyes it is pretty interesting.
user76423
December 05, 2008, 03:28 PMWhat ChinesePod can learn from Skritter (and PopupChinese): An Option “Trad. characters/Simp. characters” in the personal profile ("Me").
All ressources will then displayed according to this option.
Why is ChinesePod in this respect so far behind? I don’t understand this.
calkins
December 06, 2008, 01:39 AMI second Hape's post. I can't understand why there is no option to use the entire CPod site in your choice of simplified or traditional. I know there's the Firefox add-on for traditional support, but this is clunky and it forces you to use the inferior (IMO) Firefox browser (I would much rather use Safari).
And it makes no sense whatsoever to have the Dialogue and Expansion tabs in traditional hanzi, but the Vocabulary tab in simplified. Talk about confusing when you're trying to learn new vocabulary!
A hand-writing recognition tool as good as Skritter's would probably be beyond CPod's resources, but I think CPod could create a watered down version. I know it's not an important goal of CPod to teach hanzi reading and writing, but I think a simple tool to give users the option would go a long way.
Hopefully some of this stuff is already in the works.
light487
December 04, 2008, 10:17 PMHrmm for some reason the picture doesn't always display.. sorry about that.