I’ve been pumping your great program over in the Mainland so much that my girlfriend’s 弟弟 is actually interested in using the program to learn Chinese in school! I have a few questions though (from his mom):
Does Skritter accept RMB payments? If not, I guess I could just use my credit card.
弟弟‘s English is not very good to be honest! Will he still be able to use Skritter to learn Chinese? Can he use the website in Chinese to learn how to write characters; my cogs recall there used to be a language option on Skritter somewhere?
Do you know of any users, or Chinese schools that are using Skritter to learn how to write their native tongue? I’m curious about the progress-- I’m already confident that spaced repetition is better than writing a character several consecutive times), though we are talking about a child here, so I guess what I’m asking is this: does spaced repetition work well for children? If you know of any research or articles on this topic, please post them =)
Can people in Mainland China download the Skritter app? What about the android version? Does it work on Chinese brand smart phones xiao3mi3 etc etc (小米等等)?
Thanks for helping to spread the word! Here’s the answers the questions for ya:
We could create an invoice that can be paid online using a Chinese credit card. Email skritter@skritter.com and we can get that taken care of for ya!
Skritter has a Chinese-Chinese language option on the site. It’s on the top bar near the username. Unfortunately, we don’t have the rest of the application translated to other languages yet, so you might have to help show him the ropes and get him started.
A few schools have tried Skritter in the past, but most students using Skritter are non-native speakers. I don’t have any research articles that focus on SRS learning with children, but my guess is that it would work just as well with them as it would with adults. We give a one-week free trial, so he (and his mom) could at least give Skritter a shot.
I’m guessing that largest barrier to entry for Chinese students would be the lack of list support for native speakers. We don’t have any of the textbooks they’re using in our system and they would have to create their own list of vocab items to start studying them.
If you don’t have access to the Google Play store you can download the Android app from the html5 site here. We recommend that the smart phone is running Android 4.1 or greater.
Shoot us an email at skritter@skritter.com if you have more questions and we’ll be happy to try and help!
Just a short note on this topic … whenever Chinese people see the Skritter app in action, they are fascinated.
They immediately want to try it out and play around (and are quite embarrassed when their stroke order is not accepted ).
Yeah it’s funny when my friends tell me my stroke order is better than theirs. Though on the other hand it’s really interesting to see the shortcuts, like putting two or three strokes together, that they make when writing, too. Reading a friend’s handwriting is an even more challenging exercise because of the strokes that are joined together, even if I do know all the characters on the page!
).