I have tried to write a balanced review and don’t pull my punches in the downsides and room for improvement section. As such, I have an interest in promoting Skritter beyond the fact that I think it’s the best tool for learning characters (I wouldn’t have joined the team if I didn’t think the product was good and I certainly wouldn’t still be using the app daily if it wan’t helpful). Through the years, I’ve become involved in the Skritter team, starting with blogging, then moving on to Chinese language support, and currently focusing content and pedagogical matters. Tune in to the Hacking Chinese Podcast to listen to the related episode:Īvailable on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcast, Overcast, Spotify and many other platforms!ĭisclaimer: I started using Skritter in 2012 and I still use it for my own learning daily, nine years later. If you already know about Skritter and want to know what’s new, you can scroll down by clicking here. In this review, I will introduce the only learning tool I use on a daily basis, Skritter, but before doing so, I will go through the basic principles of learning. The good news is that by combining the best learning methods with the best learning tools, learning to read and write in Chinese is easier than ever. I certainly don’t! But I have learnt to write Chinese well-enough to pass handwritten exams in graduate school in subjects like teaching pedagogy, which involved writing non-stop by hand for three hours. The route taken by Chinese children is not open to us, because it means writing characters for hours every day for more than ten years. So, how can an adult foreigner learn and remember thousands of characters while busy with work, family and life? This is not the case, because learning to write in Chinese is not a matter of learning to combine a few dozen symbols in more or less complex ways, it’s about learning 3000-4000 characters that are only indirectly linked to pronunciation, a link which only becomes truly useful once you already know a lot of characters. Some people think that it’s akin to learning a new alphabet, so similar to learning to write Korean or Russian.
It’s hard for outsiders to understand the challenge Chinese characters pose for learners.
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