A month ago, we sent out a call for a Remote Scholar to take over for Chris and help us keep up with the user-suggested corrections to the Skritter corpus. We were overwhelmed with excellent applicants, interviewing 28 of the most qualified, and wished we could hire more than one.
So we hired two. I’m happy to welcome to the team Evan Staff on the Chinese side and Jeremy Arns on the Japanese side. Both gentlemen have been using Skritter for over two years, and they’ll be disciplining the hordes of your corrections and curating your content. They’ll also join us in answering your questions from the other side of the Skritter feedback box.
Hark! They introduce themselves.
Evan says: A young and Wacom-less buck, I started Skrittering at 18, in the throes of my second semester of college (and Chinese), desperately and awkwardly dragging my mouse for every last stroke in hope of replacing the routine of flustered maddened scribbling onto chalkboards and into the lectures of other classes. Three years and many characters later, I find it hard to imagine where I’d be now if not for Skritter. Probably dead. Or at least not so great at Chinese.
As a society, we’re currently undergoing a huge reconceptualization of what it means to learn and to have an education, with traditional classroom approaches beginning to be eschewed in favor of more scientifically grounded methodologies. I see Skritter as being at the forefront of this movement, empowering language learners to better take their studies into their own hands, and am needless to say very pumped to become a part of that mission.
Jeremy says: 自己紹介があまり得意ではありませんが、
I found Skritter a couple years ago while searching for the most efficient method possible of keeping track of character writings. Little did I know that not only would it serve that purpose, but it would also be entertaining. I’d like to imagine what calligraphers in the past would think about a technology like this–it would blow their minds! Realizing how powerful of a tool it is, naturally I haven’t stopped keeping a database within Skritter of all the words and characters that I’ve learned, and it’s reassuring knowing that there is little possibility of me forgetting them.
Seeing how Skritter is expanding and improving, it’s great to think about how much more fun and more powerful it will become. Japanese and the pursuit of knowledge is my passion, I feel lucky to have something like Skritter available to me in this futuristic world that we live in–and it’s great to get to help contribute towards it!