Forming a 重金属乐队 (zhòngjīnshǔ yuèduì, Heavy Metal Band) in Shanxi Province

My idea was to form the first ever heavy metal band at Shanxi Agricultural University. The first order of business was to locate the musically talented metal heads on campus. The preferred method of announcing things was to make giant red posters with handwritten 汉字 on them and post them up all over the campus using a liberal amount of thick gluey paste. So I asked a Chinese friend to help me out with the text and calligraphy for the posters. Here’s what our end product looked like:



In case you can’t make out some of his 草体 (cǎotǐ, cursive style) characters, here is the text of the poster and a translation:


海报 (hǎibào)
Announcement:

一个疯狂的美国人 (yígè fēngkuáng de měiguórén)
A crazy American hopes to share

带着他那炽热癫狂的激 (dàizhe tā nà chìrè diānkuáng de jī)
his insane enthusiasm for starting

情望与农大学子组建本 (qíng wàng yú nóngdà xuézǐ zǔjiàn běn)
this school’s first heavy metal

校第一个重金属乐队 (xiào dì yígè zhòngjīnshǔ yuèduì)
band with students.

(招募：主唱吉他手贝斯手 (zhāomù: zhǔchàng jítāshǒu bèisīshǒu)
(recruiting: a lead singer,guitar player, bass player,

鼓手) 有意者请联系：乔杰明 (gǔshǒu, yóuyìzhě qǐng liánxì: Qiáo Jiémíng)
and a drummer) Interested parties please contact: Qiao Jieming

电话：6287286 (diànhuà)
by phone at 6287286

A couple of days after posting my ads I met my first prospective guitar player. “你好。我叫乔杰明” (Nǐhǎo. Wǒ jiào Qiáo Jiémíng, Hi. my name is Qiao Jieming) I said, reaching out to shake his hand. “Hi,” he says in English, “Nice to meet you. My name is Hand.” I paused, thinking, “I’ve heard some pretty weird English names, but, really? Hand?” So just to be sure I asked him how he spells his name and he spelled it out for me, “H.U.N.T.” Not wanting to criticize his English pronunciation before we had even been properly introduced, I nodded my head in recognition and we got down to the business of the band.

My first question for him was what bands had he been listening to recently. This was part of my screening process. He mentioned the Backstreet Boys, Beyond (a rock band from Hong Kong popular in the late 80s and early 90s) and Westlife (An Irish ‘boyband’ style pop group). Hunt had already lost his chance at being in the band with his mention of Westlife (who’s smooth melodies and loverboy lyrics were the polar opposite of the type of heavy metal music I had in mind for the band. For a classic example of Westlife at their cheesiest, check out “Season’s in the Sun”, a song that was very 红 (hóng, popular, lit. red) last year in Shanxi Province.

For a couple of days I continued meeting a bunch of so-called metal enthusiasts who echoed Hunt’s musical taste. Luckily I did also meet a couple of true metal fans who put Metallica and Megadeth at the top of their lists. The band ended up as a three piece outfit with Dragon and me on guitars and Jack on drums. We had three original speed metal songs at the height of our rehearsal career. The band was short-lived because of our bad work ethic and also scheduling problems since Jack was already married and lived with his wife in 槊州 (Shuòzhōu), a small city a couple of hours to the North of the University.

As I went about choosing musicians for the metal band I became more aware of the “language power struggle” in friendships where both people are interested in practicing their 2nd languages. In my bandmates I was looking for heavy metal enthusiasts who were willing to speak Chinese with me. Hunt didn’t make the cut for two reasons: his musical taste and also because he insisted on only speaking English with me. In general during my time in 山西 (shānxī) I tried to become friends with people who were willing to speak with me in Chinese for at least part of the time. When I was getting to know a new Chinese friend, there was usually a period of time when we were still trying to figure out the right balance of English/Chinese to use in order to communicate most efficiently. It was always a delicate balance because I didn’t want to discourage my friends from learning English, but also I didn’t want to feel like I was being used all the time for English practice. On the flipside, I also didn’t want my Chinese friends to feel like I was using them all the time to practice my Chinese.

I’m wondering how other skritter users have navigated friendships where there is a give and take between Chinese and English(or other languages). What are your thoughts on the “language power struggle” in friendships?

Wacoms a'comin'

Is using the mouse for Skritter getting you down? We have talked for some time about introducing Wacom writing tablets on the website, and now we are days away from introducing them. I made a mockup for Scott a little while ago and he is now in the throes of creating a system that will allow people to purchase the tablets on Skritter. You will have the option to use a credit card that is on file or enter a new credit card, shipping will be done through FedEx, and we will be unable to offer international shipping (this is just because our reseller's shipping rates are much higher than larger companies like Amazon). If you, like 50% of our user base, are living abroad, we will provide you links to larger resellers that will offer more competitive shipping rates.

The Wacom store will be linked to from the home page. You can see how that interface will look below:


The Wacom store it self will look like this:


The prices have been intentionally blurred out because we are we have not finalized our pricing decisions. As we have mentioned before both in form topics and e-mails, we will be offering Wacom tablets at discounted prices. We will not be making any profit from selling the tablets, we see the real benefits of offering them as simply enhancing the user experience. All three of us have been using Skritter with tablets for quite a while and they make the accuracy, ergonomics, and general user experience dramatically better. If it costs us some lost profit to make your user experience that much better, we are willing to lose the money.

The challenge of 谦虚: learning to be a humble Chinese language student

Hello to the Skritter community! I’ve been lurking behind the scenes for the past half year, proofreading and translating entries in the skritter database. Now that Christopher and Gabriel are on board to handle the back end vocabulary linguistics work, I’ll be doing some guest blogging on a variety of topics related to learning Chinese.

A little background info first - I’ve studied Chinese for three and a half years. The first year was at Oberlin College and the second two were in China where I was teaching English at the Shanxi Agricultural University. Now I’m living back in Oberlin where I’m an ESL teacher (for Chinese high school students) by day and a heavy Skritter/Chinesepod user by night.

The challenge of 谦虚: learning to be a humble Chinese language student

To kick off the series of posts, I’d like to discuss humbleness in Chinese culture and how that affects the Chinese language learner. The roots of humbleness go way back in Chinese culture to Confucius. In China today being humble is still an encouraged and expected behaviour. Chinese people are taught to be 谦虚 (humble) and to avoid 吹牛 (lit. blowing the cow, meaning to brag). Chinese school children all learn the saying by Chairman Mao, “谦虚使人进步，骄傲使人落后” (Being humble makes people improve, and being arrogant causes one to fall behind).

During my time in China sometimes even the smallest conversations brought me face to face with the issue of being humble. Take for example a conversation at a bubble tea stand. I start it off: “I’d like a cup of bubble tea, please”. The seller responds, “Your Chinese is great!”. I have two choices now of how to reply. I could say, “Thanks!”, or I could say something humble like “No, actually my Chinese is very bad”. The danger with the “thanks!” response is that you run the risk of seeming too proud. I’ve found that the other choice is often met with a “Wow, you’re humble too!” comment, or at least a smile which probably means that the person is satisfied with my humbleness.

I remember one time I made the mistake of 吹牛 when I invited a couple of friends over for dinner at my house the night before I left for a vacation. I had “daizou-ed” (带走) a bunch of food from a restaurant near my house and prepared a goodbye meal. Towards the end of the meal when we were all past the point of being stuffed but still going strong my Chinese friends started to give me compliments, “You are a great friend to prepare all of this food for us! You are really are a generous guy!” All of a sudden a grammar pattern from language school popped into my mind and I spurted it out without thinking twice: “这到也是” (a slangy way of saying - this is true, I agree with you). My friends burst into laughter. They were expecting me to be humble and refute their praise but instead I had come off as a jerk with no sense of what is an appropriate response to compliments. Those friends and I remembered my faux pas fondly, often joking about it during the following year.

Compliments fly when foreigners speak Chinese in China. You need to be equipped with a set of humble ways to deflect those compliments. So for all of you Chinese speaking skritter users out there, what do you do in the face of a compliment about your language ability from a Chinese person? Do you have any embarrassing stories to share about forgetting to be humble in China?

Japanese Sounds Courtesy of Smart.fm

We've just seeded our database with over six thousand words worth of audio files for Japanese! These sounds were made available through Smart.fm's developer API and the Creative Commons License. This API is quite extensive, and we plan in the future to use it to make their lists available to search through and study here at Skritter, much like we offer ChinesePod lists for Chinese users now.

Thanks to Smart.fm for making these resources available!

Active Pinyin Practice, France

I've just uploaded the alpha version of the active pinyin practice that I've been working on. There are still several things I need to do to it, like making it look good, but it's got most of what we intend. If you're feeling adventurous, enable it on your practice settings, get some new words added with the pinyin part, and try it out! We need feedback on how usable it is and what would make it work better for you.

Here are the things it should be awesome at right now:

• Figuring out which characters' pinyins and tones you know. Although it only tells you if you got the whole word and tones right or wrong, behind the scenes it also updates a word's component characters' items when it makes sense to do so. Efficient!
• Turning the pinyin in your head into pinyin on the screen. Tone marks are handled with my elaborate scheme (tell me if you like it!), 儿化音 érhuàyīn are easy to input, and typos creating invalid pinyins should be prevented automatically.
• Going fast! I think you'll chew through these like 孟子 Mèngzǐ chews through marshmallows.

But there are a few things which I haven't been able to do yet:

• The prompt area outside the Flash looks weird.
• The Genius doesn't yet group together similar items, so if you have multiple parts active to study, they'll be all mixed in and you'll have to switch between keyboard and mouse/pen more frequently than ideal.
• The correct button and toggling grading indicators in the prompt don't work right yet, so don't use those on these pinyin prompts. If you want to change your score, retype the pinyin.
• Long pinyins go off the screen, no back button shortcut, no tone coloring, and a few other minor things.
• Not well tested. (Hope you can help here!)

I would wait to upload until I did those things, but I'm going to go explore France with my girlfriend tomorrow afternoon until the 15th, and I wanted to share the sweet taste of active pinyin before that. I'll be out of touch while hiking around, but George and Scott will be here cooking up more practice pizzas for y'all.

After I get back and upgrade this pupker, a similar mode for Japanese reading practice will follow, which should be a lot easier.

Oh, by the way: also on the practice page settings, there's now a "Use Wacom plugin" option. If you have a Wacom tablet, you can activate pressure-sensitive drawing there. I haven't used it to affect the recognition yet, but the squig drawing looks cooler. If you have the tip feel set to max softness, it will max out easily and draw really big. I set mine two notches down and it works better.

Payment System Up; What's Next

Just uploaded the new payment system! As we said, existing users will still be able to purchase at the old prices until March 26th. Interestingly, the two year purchase has become abnormally popular lately...

I've been spending quite a bit of time going over and testing everything that was shuffled around: user referrals, coupons, school validations, and alike, both with the old system and the new. I've been very careful with this, and I'll be keeping an extra careful eye on the payment system to make sure it's working correctly. One thing that can be sure though: while credit card information is being transferred through us to our credit card payment gateway service provider, Authorize.Net, that information is encrypted the whole way.

And now that we have a credit card system in place, I can work on setting up a Wacom tablet store. These tablets are perfect for use for Skritter; we use them ourselves and time and again users have let us know how good they are for practicing. This should be fairly quick to build, so you won't have to wait much longer!



After that I'll be diving into a very large project indeed: the rebuilding of the vocab system from the ground up. I'll be starting by creating a practice navigation page, which you will reach by clicking the practice tab, rather than immediately going to a practice page. On this new page you will be able to:

• Study all your vocab (currently how it works)
• Study a single list by itself.
• Study a single section of a list by itself.
• Study a set of words entered in a textbox.
• Browse all lists and sections studied, ordered by activity.
• Remove a list from study, without removing words that have been added from other lists that you are still studying.

We get a lot of emails about the vocabulary list system. It's confusing how checking lists for study only changes whether words are added or not, and keeps words that have been added in study. By having users choose whether they want to study all the words they've added or a list or a section, it should be much clearer what they have chosen to study. It will also be simpler to remove words from study.

With these changes, cram mode will be phased out. Having two different kinds of lists, normal and cram, is confusing. So we're switching to having just one kind of list, and making it easy to study that list or a section in that list by itself, and being able to drop in a set of words on the fly to study. This should cover the same needs the current cram system covers, and will be much clearer and easier to use.

There are two more parts to the vocab overhaul: remaking the list editor and vastly upgrading the queue. With all these come new features and significant improvements in usability, so we hope you like these upcoming changes!

Credit Cards, Pricing Changes

We have decided to change our prices and pricing infrastructure in 1 month's time. Starting on March 26th, Skritter will cost $9.95/mo, you will no longer be able to purchase multiple months of Skritter service, and billing will be done only via credit cards on a month-to-month basis.

If you are currently a paid user, this change in prices will only affect you when your subscription expires (e.g. if your account expires in June 2010, you will only be migrated to the new system in June). Between now and the 26th of March, existing users will still be able to buy Skritter through the old 1, 3, 6, 12, and 24 month Paypal/Google Checkout payment system, but we are migrating away from the old system and so new registering users won't have access to those payment options. If you want to continue paying with Paypal or Google Checking after March 26th, you will be able to pay for a 1 year subscription at the monthly rate.

The free trial will still be 2 weeks long, but we will require billing information during registration like Netflix, 37 Signals' Basecamp, and World of Warcraft. Because we realize that auto billing can sometimes catch people unaware, we are continuing our 100% refund policy and we will email new users 5 days and then again 1 day prior to being billed.

We are discontinuing the use of discount coupons, so if you have such a coupon, the code on it will cease to function in 30 days. We will continue to use coupons for institutional sales, but end user coupon discounts will cease functioning.

Institutional rates will be unaffected by these changes. To date we have done our institutional pricing separately from individual pricing, and it will continue to be done that way.

There are three big reasons we are changing the billing and pricing system:

1) To increase ease of use and simplify the signup process We've done a lot of one-on-one usability testing, and many of the testers had difficulty understanding how much Skritter cost at a glance which led a significant number of them to believe Skritter was significantly more expensive than it really is.

2) To satisfy prospective customers People keep telling us they don't like Paypal and Google Checkout. Since we launched we have heard from quite a few people who wanted to pay but didn't want to use or didn't understand Paypal and Google Checkout.

3) To satisfy existing customers Among current users, most would prefer to just use a credit card. We have been gathering data using the homepage poll about how many people want to continue paying with Google Checkout and Paypal (with and without existing balances). The results are clear: you would rather use your credit card without a third party service.

Since this is the first time we have made a big change in service, we wanted to give everyone one month's time before making the changes. If you have more questions or would like any clarifications, drop us a line and we'll do our best to help out.