Japanese, Skritty and the Magnet

The past few days Nick and Scott have been making dramatic headway on the Japanese version of Skritter which will soon be released upon the world. At the moment, we're focusing our efforts on getting a Japanese version of the scratchpad done, as a sort of internal testing tool for the eventual release of the full featured version. Site navigation has been discussed, subdomains have been activated, and an internal use tool has been born. You can check out the very chic looking screenshot below. You might notice Scott's excellent taste in backgrounds. That particular picture is the first result if you do a Google image search for "anime."

While Nick, Scott, Maksym and have been working, my girlfriend put together some really cool little Skritters for the Chicago homeschooling conference that we will be attending next week. They're pretty neat if I do say so myself.

Finally, Nick and I have struck again. Last year we bought a 1" diameter spheroid neodymium magnet that we played with until its exterior was flaking away. It's been residing on our refrigerator for a long time, but it's always been our design to purchase a larger one. Last week that plan was brought to fruition. We bought a 2" spheroid neodymium magnet from the ominously named unitednuclear.com. which arrived on Monday evening. Needless to say, we spent that entire night playing around with it. It's a lot of fun if you're careful and remain aware of all the ferrous objects without 6 inches of it. Additionally, we can't comfortably bring it into our command center for fear that it will roll unpredictably and destroy some sensitive piece of electronics. We conducted an experiment using the ridiculous setup and found out that it has a pull force of about 110 lbs! Being careful is a must, but geez is that thing fun to play with.

Chinese Campfires

我跟我女朋友 took a trip this weekend to Kelleys Island, which is north of Sandusky Ohio, out in Lake Erie. It's a very small place, populated during the summer months mainly by tourists like myself. In my opinion, Kelleys Island is the only place that has ever made Lake Erie look beautiful.

We camped, hiked, and swam. I got to read some Wired Magazine and I'm now sporting a pretty mean sunburn. I was fretting a little about the upcoming semester and my second year of studying Chinese. I haven't been studying anything except characters all summer (and the only reason I've been practicing characters is because Skritter makes it really easy and sort of game-like). In the evening we ate dinner out of a cooler and made s'mores. (I wonder how you would say s'mores in 中文?) I practiced a little Chinese by scrawling out 中文 on the side of the fire pit using a piece of charcoal. Charcoal is a lot harder to write with, so I did the stroke order all wrong, which really irked me. I really need to grab the proverbial bull by the horns here shortly and start listening to more ChinesePod and starting my translation exercises again, lest 马老师 frown upon me and call me a 坏蛋.

Write 口 faster

Over the past weeks, George has been going through all 4050 of our characters, fixing stroke orders, adding new strokes, and making characters look nicer. Much of what he's been doing is adding shortcuts to allow you to write 口-like boxes in two strokes instead of three. You write the left side, and then you can now write the other sides in one stroke, if you want. Just make a "z"-shaped stroke, or a right-down-left bracket stroke if you must.

Let us know if we missed any little, three-stroke boxes that should have this shortcut by pressing the "stroke order" button when you see one. There are a bunch of new stroke order mistakes, too, so just maul that button (don't need to enter any text). I've tricked out the Chef, so it's now much easier to fix and upload strokes; you won't have to wait as long for fixes. Now George can do it and I don't have to do anything. Thanks for taking over that task, George! (George is camping this weekend.)

Finally: Cramming is Back!

Cramming has made its triumphant return! But like Gandalf's reincarnation, it has returned in a new form. No longer is it a 'mode'. Instead of switching to 'cram mode' and choosing a section from a list on the vocabulary lists page, you can create multiple custom cram lists and study from them at your leisure on a separate page from the normal practice page. We've made it easy to create and edit these lists, all from the cram lists page, and easy to choose one to study. You can also go to any vocabulary list and choose a section and it will auto-generate a cram list composed of the words from that section.

When you study from a cram list, you'll be studying from a page that's a cross between the regular practice page and scratchpad. You'll have control over what you practice like in the scratchpad, but your studies will be recorded normally like in practice mode. Words are provided in the order they were put in the list, unless you reorder them with the river at the bottom of the page or you use the shuffle button. Let us know if there are other ways you would like to have control over your cramming.

Remember to continue to use normal practice mode, though! You'll get the most out of your studies if you make sure you study based on the scheduling that's going on in the background, so it's important not to rely too heavily on cram mode. Use it wisely!

In other news, I've just reorganized the progress tracking system. Why is this important? Because it's a prerequisite to two very large and important features: Japanese and pinyin/definition practice to be exact. The system wasn't nearly flexible enough to handle that many more things to keep track of, so this had to be done. The new progress system also happens to be a prerequisite for rankings. So onwards to more features! In the meantime, if you notice something going weird with your progress tracking, let us know so we can iron out any bugs that sneaked in while I was shuffling everything around.

Give us your feedback on cram lists! It's been demanded for so long, we're eager to make sure it does what you want it to do.

Bokken Attack!

Have you ever heard of Bokkens? They are wooden practice swords made in the shape of Katanas (sometimes Tantos as well). They're made for sparring practice and to help Kendo students improve their Katas. All we know is that they are totally sweet looking and we just bought 4 of them from Amazon for a mere $12/ea. The only reason I knew they existed at all was a friend of mine had one during high school. He lived out the woods and every time we were out at his house, we'd take turns brandishing it and running through the woods hacking at weeds and thistles. Man that was fun.

So, we got these sweet Bokkens and of course the first thing that Nick, Scott, Maksym and I did was take them out of their packaging, run into the street and start hunting weeds to hack. We were pretty much all barefoot running around our paved residential street making "hiya!" noises while clumsily but eagerly swinging our wooden swords. We did praying mantis stances, we did imitations of anime fight sequences, Nick and I spouted gibberish Japanese several times, and numerous passing cars slowed down while the occupants (principally middle aged women) stared incredulously at the spectacle of 4 seemingly grown dudes running around with swords slicing weeds in twain.

At about this time our neighbor, who also happens to be the grant administrator that voted to give our company its seed capital, happened by walking his dog. He thought it was jolly good fun, and the day after, asked Scott where he could purchase one of the swords (presumably for his teenage son). We just kept on hacking after he went inside, and we experimented briefly with our ability to use our bullwhip to yank the Bokken out of a person's hand. That didn't work so well, and I managed to accidentally whip myself pretty hard, but it was still pretty awesome.

List editor improvements

I'm using the custom list editor to upload some more textbooks, and so we've made some improvements to the process to make longer lists easier to manage. The first is that you can include all sections in one dump by adding asterisks:

...
画蛇添足
成语
* Lesson 5
我
篮球
只羡鸳鸯不羡仙
* Lesson 6
...

The second is that it will now accept entries for which we don't yet have the characters. So you can make, say, a list of elements in the periodic table, and it will include 镍 (niè, nickel) and the other 21 missing elemental characters. They'll just be skipped over when adding from the list until we can create them.

I've also made it so that you can hover over the characters for words that you'd need to create and get a tooltip containing the possible pinyins we have for each character so far. Makes it quicker to add new ones without a dictionary lookup. Those characters also function as a link to nciku, for when you need the definition, too.

If you want to make some lists but don't have any source material, you can input some of the remaining lists from the custom wordlist Google doc that we put together a while ago.

Happy list building!

ChinesePod Updates and More

Another week, another update! For a while now I've been making major changes to the vocabulary list backend. The first half of those changes allowed me to make the custom list system, and the result of the second half completed today is the complete reorganization of the way ChinesePod lists work. Improvements include:

• Calling ChinesePod's servers less frequently by caching data on our servers, making both browsing and adding from their lists just about as fast as native Skritter lists.


• More stability.


• A new ChinesePod list page for signing in and finding the lesson or label you want to use.


• ChinesePod lessons are split into two sections: Key Vocabulary and Supplementary, instead of lumped into one.


• Words you add from ChinesePod lists will have the specific list and section names shown when you practice, as opposed to before when it just said 'ChinesePod'. I'm afraid words that have already been added from ChinesePod lists will continue to say 'ChinesePod', but if you add from those lists again the items should get the more specific list data.

A few other changes have been made to the site: I decided to take the inner tab system that was used in places like the pricing and list pages and am using it now on the preferences and vocabulary options pages, sorting them a bit more nicely. Made some changes to the main vocabulary page too.

And now, I've got a handful of relatively small things to do, bug fixes and smaller feature requests. And then after those are done I'll revamp the progress tracking system to both improve it on the backend and allow for rankings so you can see where you stack up among the other Skritter users. The new progress tracking system also just so happens to be a prerequisite for Japanese...

Onward!