List Images for All!

So you may not have noticed, but textbook images are sprouting out of the vocabulary list section. Where once there was only a default Skritter logo, there are now visual aides to help you locate the book that you are searching for. You know the one. That one with the funny guy in the 80s trousers on the yellow background (that actually doesn't narrow it down much as it turns out).

The cool thing is that you can now add images to your own lists. So let's say that you want to make a list about some good old primates. Let's say that you want that list to feature a picture of your favorite chimpanzee, Mr. First-Image-Result-On-Google-Images Himself. All you have to do is click on the "edit image" link underneath your avatar:

In the popup, select your image and upload. And then bam, check out the results:

Now if that's not an adorable new Skritter feature, I don't know what is.

Life in the hard-seat

Jacob Gill is a recent addition to the Skritter team who will be contributing to our blog and lending his language learning wisdom to the team. Jacob was recruited by our very own Ben Reitz during Ben's summer spent teaching in mainland China. Jacob is a graduate student studying for his MA in Teaching Chinese as a Second Language from National Taiwan Normal University. Prior to graduate studies, he graduated from UW-Milwaukee with a degree in Communication and Chinese. He maintains his own blog over here: http://ilearnmandarin.blogspot.com/. We have been very impressed with Jacob, and look forward to sharing him with the Skritter community. So without further ado, Jacob Gill!

On any given day more than 10 million people are traveling by train (火车: huǒchē) across China. While car purchases are on the rise, and airports can be found in every major city, trains still remain the cheapest and most practical form of transportation for trekking across the Middle Kingdom. As a foreigner traveling China, I have found trains to be a great way to practice my Chinese and make new friends; mostly little kids who are put on by their parents to get a free English lesson from the foreign guy squished into the bunk above.

This summer I spent 25 days traveling China, visiting seven cities and traveling over 6000km, and I did the whole thing by train. Being the “rich” foreigner that I am, I usually traveled by hard-sleeper (卧铺: wòpù). Sure… the bunks are small and a bit cramped (especially when you are 6’3” like me), but ticket prices were very reasonable and I always had a place to catch some Zs. 

It made my 26-hour train ride from Chóngqìng (重庆) to Kūnmíng (昆明) a breeze, and although I could have cut my travel time down to three hours by flying, I saved about 500kuài, which was more than enough to cover my hostel, food and endless amounts of Qīngdǎo (青岛) in Kūnmíng .

Before I set out to travel this summer, I was determined to use only trains… no matter what. I thought it would be the perfect way to really see China, and interact with its people. My stubbornness got the best of me, and before the end of my trip I found myself sitting on a hard-seat (硬座: yìngzuò) for a 36-hour train ride. The hard-seat, which is really a hard-bench, seats three people per side. There is a small table near the window that can act as a pillow, but that’s only if you’re lucky enough to sit in front of it…which I wasn’t. I was on my way to Xī’ān (西安) from Kūnmíng for a friend’s wedding, and after three desperate days of early morning trips to the train station, and calls (and visits) to travel agents searching for an empty sleeper, it was the only available option. Despite all the horror stories I had heard, I paid my $32USD and decided to find out what life in the hard-seat was all about.

Things started out okay. I found a place to put my luggage and was surprised to find that all the people in my row of seats were students heading to Xī’ān and beyond to start their next semester of college. It wasn’t long before a few parents spotted me on the train and sent their son over to “entertain” me by counting from one to one hundred in English, twice! I began to realize that traveling by train in China is the great equalizer. I wasn’t sitting with the poorest of the poor, I was just sitting with people, like me, who couldn’t get a sleeper. There are, simply put, just way too many people in China.

That, however, is the problem—there are simply too many people in China. After our first stop of many, the already stuffed train car was now filled to the brim, over crowded by at least 30% as people with standing tickets, which sell for the same price as a hard-seat, boarded the train. They rushed to find prime spots to squat for the long journey, mostly in the areas between two train cars, tucked behind doors where they would have enough space to at least sit down. When those spots were filled however, people began to siphon into the aisles and areas in front of the bathrooms. They tried their best not to get in the way, but they failed miserably, laying claim to any patch of ground that could accommodate their stuff.

As if things were not already chaotic enough, food and drink carts forced there way through the heaps of people, relocating them about every 30 minutes, selling over-priced bottles of water and bad food that got colder and colder every time they stopped to “ask” someone to get out of their way. The best train-peddler was a young girl explaining the usefulness of a toothbrush, and selling them at a great deal of, “buy one get one free”!  

Late into the night I made my first trip to the bathroom. I gently tiptoed around the sleeping people and legs that stuck out from under benches, where people risked being stepped-on to catch a few precious winks. I walked straight into a cloud of smoke from those who couldn’t get to sleep and were masterfully ignoring the no smoking signs posted right above their heads. I waited for about ten minutes for someone to walk out of the bathroom and for the vacant sign to appear, but it never happened. Eventually someone caught the drift that I wasn’t trying to get my fix of second hand smoke and explained that there was probably someone sleeping in there. I could have disturbed their slumber, but than again, I wasn’t sure that they would actually leave, so I wandered to another train car to find an unoccupied restroom.

About 15 hours into our journey to Xī’ān, the train ran out of hot water. There was no panic, or even complaint. We refilled at our next stop, and it was tapped out quickly thereafter, when a line of people four train cars deep waited patiently to add water to their cup-o-noodle. It was a strange site, seeing people actually form a line in China, one of those rare moments that required documentation. But then again, the aisles were so crowded that they didn’t really have a choice.

Although train workers came by every few hours to collect empty food boxes and bottles, the trash bins were so full that train windows and the floor seemed to be the most viable options for many patrons. Some people who had taken the long journey as a chance to knock back a few beers and some báijiǔ(白酒) didn’t even bother to walk toward the bathrooms to smoke, lighting up right at their seats. No one reminded them that they shouldn’t be smoking there, just like the trash going out the window, they put the problem out of their minds. People in China have an amazing ability to deal with uncomfortable situations, or as they say in Chinese, chī kǔ (吃苦).

Despite hardly getting any sleep during my 36-hour journey, and being a pillow for the guy sitting next to me, the trip wasn’t all bad. Everyone that I met was incredibly kind and I learned a lot about China. People were surprisingly open about their displeasure with certain government policies, and more than willing to listen to the opinions of a lone foreign traveler. I made a lot of new friends during that trip and learned so much about where they were coming from and the places they were going. 

Riding on the hard-seat, for me, was more than just a 36-hour language lesson. It was a lesson in humility and perseverance. Never once did I hear complaints from people being asked to move from the floor as a cart or fellow patron shuffled by. And more than once I witnessed passengers giving up their own hard-seat for a few hours so those who were standing could get some honest sleep. While traveling by hard-seat isn’t something that I would do often, I learned a lot about life during those 36 hours. I would recommend that everyone, at least once during their travels, spend some time experiencing life in the hard-seat.

New List System: All Powerful Lists

Lists in the old system did not handle change well. Our original vision was for lists to be for the longer term things. Textbooks that were printed were the main use case, or lists for classes that would not change. But for quickly adding a couple words to a constantly expanding list of technical terms, or just words you pick up day by day serendipitously, it just did not work well. Editing a section involved finding the list, choosing a section, loading up the entire section for editing and going to the bottom to add the one or two new words. And then, when you were done editing the list, you still had to edit the list settings to make sure those words found their way into your studies! This required understanding how exactly Skritter takes words from lists and adds them to My Words. All in all it added up to a lot of inconvenience if you were trying to edit a list frequently.

This is where the queue came in to fill the void. We made it super easy to add to the queue, either with the built in list editor or through any number of services and tools such as MDBG or the bookmarklet. And there were no settings to change; you simply added the word to the queue and it would get studied eventually no matter what.

But it lacked all the good things about the list system; in fact the queue and the old lists were polar opposites in terms of abilities. Queues were easy to add to, lists were not. Lists could be controlled and organized, queues could not. Words added to the queue eventually got studied, but words added to lists only got added sometimes if you weren't careful. And you could have multiple lists divided up into sections for organizing your words, but you could only have one massive unlabeled queue.

So the new lists were built to combine all the good things about the queue and old lists and banish the bad. When you add a word to a list, it will get added as long as you are studying the list, just as it would have if you added it to the queue. With the new Quick Add feature, you have the choice to either quickly tack on a word or two to an existing list or take the time to edit the entire thing, moving and removing words as well. And you now have the choice to categorize and sort the words you add into multiple lists, or simply leave the defaults as they are if you prefer. It works for you no matter how much or how little you want to organize.

The list settings are also now much more powerful. Previously when you chose to skip a section, it would only prevent additional words from being added. Now, it also removes the words from those sections. This way whatever your list settings are, you can be assured that those are the only words that you will end up studying. But even if you do end up removing words through this feature, they can just as easily be added back.

Because the new lists are aiming to be the best of both worlds, there is no longer a separate queue, which many people once relied on heavily. Our goal was for lists to be just as quick to add to and easy to use as the queue of old, but since the release of this new list system we have been called upon to make quick adding, well, quicker. We're currently formulating some ambitious plans to settle the concerns that have been raised recently, and I'll be getting to work very soon implementing these changes. If you'd like to join the discussion, please feel free to jump into the forum or contact us with your thoughts. Your feedback as always is valuable to us!

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By the way, we've just sent out the Skritter September newsletter. Check it out for some details about the man behind the legend, Chris Clark.

New List System: Word Popup Redesign

When you want to see all sorts of useful information about a given word, where do you go? The word popup of course! Click a word in a list or press the magnifying glass icon while studying, and you'll get a big popup with everything there is to know about the word. Because of its importance and how many things we've added to it recently (and wanted to add), we decided the list system overhaul would be a good time to redesign it from the ground up.

The main changes are visual. There are now three main parts to it: the core information, the study status, and related words and characters.

You'll find things like the reading and the definition in the core information, as well as study aids such as your chosen example sentence and mnemonic. Things you can edit are marked with a pencil icon, which you can click to make changes. Other bits of information, such as how difficult/rare the word is and for Chinese, what traditional or simplified versions are related to it, are all there as well.

In the study status area you'll find all the information relating to your learning, such as what parts you're studying and when they're due and how well you know them. This is also where you'll see what lists the words have been added from, and where you can edit the ban settings on a individual part basis.

And finally the column on the right side of the popup is where you'll find all sorts of words and characters that are related to the one you're looking at. For a word, you're just shown the individual characters it contains, but characters show a great deal of information, such as the decomposition and lists of words and characters that contain the character. And with the new setup, you can view the complete list for each, not just the first four words as was the case in the old version.

The word popup has also been refitted with everything you need for the new list system. As mentioned before, there's the new ban button, and there are also new quick add buttons to replace the ones that used to add words directly to your queue. These give you all the information and control you need to expand your studies just the way you like.

Coming up next: editing lists and automatic updates.

New List System: Banned Words

One of the things we set out to do from the beginning was to make Skritter as efficient as possible. It takes long enough learning thousands of Chinese and Japanese characters as it is; you don't want to be slowed down by anything. One of the main ways we make things more efficient is we make sure vocabulary lists play nice with each other, disallowing any sort of wasteful duplication of study between different lists. If words are in two or more lists you're studying, you don't study that word any more often than any other word. Period. This is how the system is built from the ground up, and it's one big way we keep learning going super fast.

 And so we decided we needed a similarly over-arching mechanism for removing words, called banning. Sometimes you don't want to study a word, because you're not interested or it is simply taking too much of your study time and isn't worth it. In these cases, you probably don't want to see the word again, or at least not for a while, even if it shows up in other lists. And so banning makes it so you can prohibit certain words from ever being added, no matter where they are coming from. A plus from the old system, you can ban a word before it's added, rather than waiting for the word to come up and then removing it.

One concern though is what do you do if you might in the future want to see this banned word again? You might change your mind later, after all. Rest assured, there are a number of ways to bring a banned word back. You can go to any of the lists a given word resides in and unban it from there. My Words now has a page for viewing banned words so at any time you can go through them to make sure there's nothing you might still want. And when a list would have added a word but didn't because it was banned, Skritter notifies you while you are studying so you're aware. With all these mechanisms, it won't be hard to unban and bring back whichever words you want.

You can also ban individual parts from studies, much like you could remove individual parts. In the word popup, click the red ban button to change the settings. Pick and choose which parts you'd like to have banned, then save your settings. If you have more than one word to ban, though, the best way to ban a bunch of words is by going to a list, selecting the words, then using the word action drop down to ban the selected words.

Coming up next: the new and improved word popup.