Why I Use Skritter To Learn To Write Chinese And Why You Should Too?

Skritter is an unique website to learn how to write Chinese and Japanese. Besides writing you can also practice tones, pinyin and meaning of characters and words. I honestly think that it’s one of the best tools out there to learn Chinese.

You might have noticed that I have a Skritter ad in my blog and it does benefit me if you click it or links in this post. But I’m a very happy user of Skritter and have recommended it to two of my friends who also started using it. Skritter alone doesn’t make your Chinese fluent, but it’s a wonderful tool to help with your writing and character recognition.

Click to any picture to see it bigger.

How to study with Skritter?

I bought this tablet and pen just to use Skritter. With a tablet I can write Chinese characters normally, just like with pencil and paper. Sure you can get started with a mouse, but in order to train your muscle memory you need to write with a pen.

After you have added or chosen your word lists you start to study. Skritter shows you the meaning of the character and you write it. If you don’t remember you can ask help. You have to write the character in a right stroke order and Skritter will remind you if you start in the wrong place.

Skritter also asks you to choose the correct tone. After choosing it will tell you is it correct or not. And a voice will read the character or word for you.

The new feature is to write the pinyin with the tone number. Skritter is improving all the time and also listening what the users have to say.

And of course you have to test if you know the meaning of the word or character. First you only see the character and the pinyin, you think the meaning in your mind and click to see the answer. Then you choose don’t know, so-so, got it or too easy according to how well you remembered the meaning.

Remember that Skritter doesn’t give these tasks in this order. It knows what you know and what you have to review. If you know the tone for example, it doesn’t ask you that every day, only once a while in order to keep that tone in your memory. There are also many more things and details in Skritter but the best way to find out about them, is to use Skritter. And you can study Japanese too!

Why to study with Skritter?

1. Skritter knows what I need to review and when. I can just concentrate on studying, not going through notebooks and pieces of paper to find out what I’ve learned and what I should do next. I just add my own word lists or use lists made by Skritter/other users and I’m ready to go.
2. Skritter shows what I’ve learned and gives me nice graphics. The picture on top shows you how many characters I have learned with Skritter since last June. First it was really addictive and I got to 200+ characters pretty quickly. Then my usual laziness came back and the speed got slower, well stopped. But now I have decided to do well in my next HSK exam and started using Skritter more than ever. In three days I learned to write 100 new characters.
3. It’s easy to set goals with Skritter. I can make goal like how many minutes to use Skritter per day, or how many characters I want to learn in a week. Setting goals is easy, and from the progress page I can see when I reach them. And sometimes Skritter also have competitions with cool prices like free writing tablets.

If you use Skritter already please share in the comments what you think about it. And if you’re not using it, but studying Chinese or Japanese, why not give Skritter a try? (If you go to Skritter via these affiliate links, it will benefit me too. Thank you!)

P.S. How many characters I should put as my goal to reach before the next HSK (汉语水平考试) exam in April? I want to get to level 5 in the old HSK.