When I tried Skritter I really struggled to write using a mouse. I found it far more productive to use a pen and paper. How do you find using the mouse to draw characters? Or have you found another input mechanism?

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Sara Reply:
January 8th, 2012 at 8:56 am

I agree, using mouse with Skritter isn’t the best option. I’m using tablet and a pen instead and it’s almost like writing with regular pen and paper! You can see the tablet in this post: http://sarajaaksola.com/why-i-use-skritter-to-learn-to-write-chinese-and-why-you-should-too/

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Bill Reply:
January 9th, 2012 at 1:13 pm

I’ve tried writing with the Apple Magic trackpad. It works well for standard character input but unfortunately it doesn’t work with Skritter.

Thanks for sharing a link to your tablet though.

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Oh man, you reminds me of my tortured childhood! :D Now thinking back, I realize Chinese is indeed THE HARDEST language to learn! I remember I spent at least 2 HOURS everyday writing pages after pages of Chinese character by character to memorize it. And that’s just the Chinese part of the homework! I am not sure what’s the average these days for primary school kids, but I thought that was hell back then. Basically, as far as I can remember, when the teacher introduce a new lesson, a bunch of new characters was introduced and that’s the homework – you write each character hundreds of times (upto 3 pages) and then you have to start making sentences with these characters (“造句” – the application part of it). I think its effective, but its hell learning this way, and probably the only way to learn Chinese knowing its already difficult for Chinese people!

But yeh, I think rote memorization is essential, because reading and writing are different – writing requires rote memorization to remember how to write (motor skill) – its probably the most difficult and frustrating part of the Chinese – I haven’t write Chinese for the past 20 years but I do read some Chinese news and books from time to time, so I can still read Chinese fluently, but I found it very difficult to write nowadays because I can’t remember how to write the word, but strangely if I see the word I can instantly recognize it. So that’s why I think reading and writing are completely different and are handle by different part of the brain. The only way to get better in writing is to keep practicing it… A LOT! So good luck with you and your study! I see you are already fluent in replying some of the Chinese posts in Chinese.

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Sara Reply:
January 13th, 2012 at 4:25 am

I’m like a Chinese school kid trying to rememeber all those characters, I just don’t have as much time and years as they do! ;) Luckily there are lots of softwares and methods these days to help you, but in the end it still counts your motivation and real hard work.

Even my teachers sometimes forget how to write a character, so it must be even more common with other people, like what you said, it happens to you. In this way Chinese is very different from other languages, because I could never forget how to write in Finnish even thoug I wouldn’t write it for a long time.

Fluent? Not quite there, but doing my best to improve!

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