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.

Welcome Christopher and Gabriel!

A while back we indicated that we were in the market some folks to help us do some back end vocabulary linguistics work. We received quite a few applications from a number of really qualified Skritterers. Regrettably we only had two positions to fill, but we are pleased to announce two new additions to the Skritter team: say hello to Christopher Clark and Gabriel Castillo! Christopher (username cclark) will be handling our character, definition, and stroke order corrections, so be sure to say hi when you send your next correction. Gabriel will be hard at work processing all the words you have added and making sure they are available for practicing as soon as possible.

In the last month or so we've fallen behind on adding vocabulary, responding to corrections, and processing vocabulary requests so we are thankful to have these two brave linguistic soldiers helping us dig out of the backlog!

Skritter.cn, MDBG Promotion, and More

Here are Skritter HQ things have been particularly busy the last week or so, and we come to you bearing the fruits of our labors! We now have a Chinese mirror for those of you located behind the Great Firewall (www.skritter.cn), our promotion with MDBG has been announced, our February newsletter went out, and we've made a number of tweaks around the site.

Many of you have been having trouble with blocked content, general slowness, and 500 server errors from China. We've been trying to tweak things for a long time, but a few weeks ago we gave up and decided to just start a mirror of the site to speed up performance and eliminate access problems for those of you access Skritter from 中国. Our preliminary tests seem to indicate that it's a big improvement, but you be the judge, check out Skritter at www.skritter.cn and let us know how that works!

As some of you may have heard, we have been working with the Chinese dictionary MDBG for a little while testing some cross-functionality. On Sunday, we officially announced the launch (you can read the MDBG press release here). The promotion lets anyone add vocabulary from MDBG to their Skritter Queue directly without any copying and pasting. So, the next time you're browsing MDBG and find a character you'd like to learn, just click on the little "S" icon and you can get your Skritter learn on when it's convenient. We'd like to thank MDBG for being willing to make this happen. We've been fans of the dictionary for a long time (I've used it extensively for my Chinese homework) and we're happy to be working together.


Our February newsletter went out a little late in the early morning (EST) of February 16th. For those of you who didn't get it, you can check it out online here. It includes an interview with a new Skritterer, site updates, coming features, and the site stats from the last month. The January contest is going to be concluding shortly, and we'll be including news of the winners in next month's newsletter as well as a new feature: a pro tour of some of Skritter's less well understood features.


If you were effected, the list creation debacle has ended, and editing is now back to normal. We lost several of our own lists in the bug, and we appreciate how understanding everyone has been. Everything is back to normal and will remain thus.

Nick has created a bookmark that enables you to add words on any page to your Skritter Queue. The "Bookmarklet" as Nick christened it, can be accessed from the the bottom of the vocabulary page. It currently doesn't have an icon (okay, that's my bad), but it seems to be working well. Let us know what you think of that.

We posted on the forum a little while ago looking for some linguistic help, and we are going to be posting our hiring decision shortly. There are other big changes that need announcing soon, but that's for another blog post.