We at Skritter work hard to provide the best app for learning Chinese and Japanese. While we are happy to have helped tens of thousands of students to learn characters over the years, there are always things to improve and new areas to explore.
To enable us to do this better and faster, we’re expanding the team, welcoming Michael Prokopchuk to Skritter! This interview is an excellent way of getting to know our new developer.
Hi, Michael!
大家好/こんにちわ/hello everybody!
Before we get to your role in the team, please tell us where your Skritter story begins!
I first used Skritter as a regular user way back in 2011 when I took Chinese in college and then on and off over the years to study when I traveled to Taiwan and Japan. I’ve always wanted to work on language learning software.
I see a lot of potential for it to help make learning languages more intuitive and fun than just rote memorizing something out of a textbook. So getting to work on Skritter is an awesome opportunity to give back to a tool that helped me and to help other people reach their learning goals!
What did you do before Skritter?
I worked as a software developer putting virtual couches into your browser (I worked on “space planning” interior design software) and before that I worked as a 3D animator.
What’s your new role in the Skritter team?
I’m a developer who will work on bringing you the latest and greatest Skritter 2.0 for web, mobile, and possibly tamagotchi if we have time. I’ll work alongside Josh and with the rest of the team to make Skritter the best educational tool to help you learn to read and write Chinese and Japanese.
Cool! How will users notice your presence?
I’m working right now on getting a sleek new stats page done for you all. Much of what I work on will be things users interact with and see, so if you see something new, there’s about a 50% chance I did it. If it’s broken though, Josh was totally the one who did it, not me.
What are you looking forward to in the new version of Skritter?
I just fixed a bug that allows me to study better on my Microsoft Surface Pro 4, so I can’t wait to get that on the live site! But looking forward, we’re all excited to improve Skritter as an educational tool that helps you learn new material as opposed to just review old material. We’ve got the right educational and engineering manpower behind us and lots of ideas, so the sky’s the limit! Good things are definitely ahead.
What challenges do you see in working with Skritter?
The new version has a lot of features we still need to add, so there’s no shortage of work to do. And of course we love to hear feedback from users about those features. Please tell us what you like, dislike, or want to see in the new version!
Apart from making Skritter better what do you enjoy doing?
I enjoy using Skritter as a regular user to learn Chinese (and some Japanese too!), attempting conversations in very broken Russian, traveling, and playing the violin as a backup plan just in case the violinist for Gogol Bordello ever retires. If anyone else wants to form an Eastern European dance rockaganda group in the meantime, get in touch!
If you could interview one famous dead person, who would it be and why?
Alan Turing–he was brilliant and had such prescient views about computing. I would be interested to know what he would have to say about where technology is headed today and also what types of statistics he would put up on Skritter 2.0.
If you were an animal, which one would it be?
I’ll give two answers to this–first I’ll say a dragon because I was born in the year of the dragon, but more specifically I’ve been christened by my cousin, a Mayan spirit animal expert, as a “mynagon”–a combination of a dragon and a myna, a type of bird known to mimic human speech.
What’s your language background?
At university I minored in Russian studies, and after a semester studying in Russia and a stint in Turkey, I came back badly bitten by the foreign language bug. That’s what initially put Chinese and Japanese on my radar. I’ll admit, the “foreignness” and “difficulty” surrounding the languages was part of what drew me in at first. While I finished my degree in the US, I tutored Taiwanese exchange students at the local ESL center and eventually enrolled in a Chinese class to learn a bit about their language.
After college I got my TEFL certification and tutored local refugees in English, and I later visited both Japan and Taiwan where those hours clocked on Skritter definitely paid off. I plan on going back to Taiwan to improve my Mandarin later this year and would love to take some classes in Japan in the future.
Let us know a secret few people know!
In high school as an aspiring filmmaker, I used to make home movies and one time Michael Douglas ended up seeing one of them. His comments were, “I didn’t understand the plot, but the music was good.” I feel like that’s simultaneously the best review any of my movies ever got and an accurate summary of my life!
We’re all happy you’re with Skritter now instead of making millions of dollars in Hollywood. Welcome to the team!