Skritter: Write Chinese

I have been studying Mandarin for 17 years, and I think this is one of the best learning apps I have ever used! I love the way you can search for different text books, and use load them into the app. I took 8 semesters of language classes while living in China, and I would use this app to help me learn the vocabulary for the day. This app has you use multiple senses when learning. You see the character, hear how it’s pronounced, and then write it. Of course, you can also repeat after it too, which will definitely help. This really helps in retention. It also gives you examples of how each character is used in a sentence. This also helps with retention. You can also take test and see how well you are learning. I have purchased this app for myself and my son, and we do it together every day. If you are serious about learning Mandarin, this is definitely an app that you should and to your curriculum!

I recommend this app to anyone beginner or advanced learner. I really like the way it allows me to focus my learning on one aspect of Chinese, such as tones, or I can choose to allow it to mix things up a little. When you’re trying to have a conversation in a language, it’s more than just recognizing what a character looks like to know its meaning. So when the app shows me the tone and then scrolls through writing a character, and then later quizzes me on the definition of a character my brain has to access the information in different ways. This is truly unique. Most apps take you through characters in the same order all the time instead. This app also allows me to focus on one aspect, such as tones only. I find this quite helpful because I have more trouble with tones. And being able to tweak the settings to focus me in ways that I find easiest to learn is awesome. Great job guys. Thank you for all your hard work.

The new updated app is a big improvement from the previous app. It’s functionally fluid and easily intuitive to the point that I often opt for the app as opposed to traditional writing practice. One improvement I hope to see in the near future is the ability to consistently study one single character. Both the ‘due cards’ and ‘continuous’ features don’t provide for the option to write the same character continually until I’ve learned from rote memory. Perhaps this is somewhat antithetical to the idea of the SRS learning structure, but often when I incorrectly write a character, I need to study several other characters that I inevitably write incorrectly as well because I’ve only just learned them. I understand there is the ‘learning’ feature, so I could potentially practice writing the character this way, but the process is a bit slow if I’ve already learned the bulk of the character’s structure. In tandem with this, it would be helpful to see a category of all the characters you’ve consistently forgotten so that each one can be independently studied. Regardless, I’ve found the app to be wonderfully complementary to my learning experience, being able to study directly from published books related to Taiwanese mandarin makes this app excellent insofar as supplementary learning materials in the Taiwanese dialect can often be hard to find.