I’m wondering if anyone has had a similar experience, and what advice they might have. I’ve been studying Chinese for around a year, and I can read sentences at around HSK3 level without too much difficulty. However, I’ve done very little writing practice so far, and I want to improve that.
I started using Skritter two days ago, and it’s been a huge improvement for me already. I’ve already completed almost all of the Skritter 101 list. While I could read all the characters, I couldn’t write many of them. However, with just a little bit of practice, it’s pretty easy to write a character that you can already recognize.
Does anyone have any advice on what lists are good for use when you can easily recognize characters but you can’t spell them? Any other study tips?
If I was in your situation @roryschuss I would go through the HSK lists 1-3 and add all the words that you can read/already know into one of your own lists (use the ‘add to list’ function). Then I would go through lists until you have finished them.
From my own experience, I would avoid adding characters that you don’t know just for the sake of it. I did that and I was left with a lot of characters that I didn’t remember why I added them. Skritter has got a good function – if you select it – where it adds an unknown character from a word add to a list. For example, if I know “谢’ and it is in one of my skritter lists, but not “感”, when I add “感谢” as a word it will also add “感”.
Doing that has really helped my character comprehension.