Using a textbook, dictionary, flashcards or phrasebook to study Chinese, there no doubt that the modern phonetic transcription of Chinese characters, know as Pīnyīn, is a great aid to learning to speak and understand the …
Skritter’s Chinese 101 List (Radicals and Words)
Before the release of the Skritter Chinese iOS app, the team set out to create the ultimate Chinese 101 list. Now, with nearly 1000 users studying it, we’ll take a more in-depth look at the …
Tips for Remembering Tones
This week’s blog post is all about tackling the four tones of Mandarin; those nasty and fun gems of Chinese that turn “may I ask a question” into “can I have a kiss.” After the …
Q&A interview with FluentFlix founder Alan Park
A few weeks ago FluentFlix’s announcement of their long awaited beta launch had the Chinese learning community going gangbusters. For those still in the dark, check out the FluentFlix intro video, and you’ll immediately see what all the …
Intro to 形聲字 (semantic + phonetic characters)
Have you ever gotten the feeling while running into a new character that you can almost guess its meaning and pronunciation before you look it up? I remember this occurring to me for the first …
Skritter Japanese iOS App Launched
Japanese app icon On June 12, we launched the Skritter Chinese iOS app to a cheering world. But not everyone got to stop drooling and start Skrittering that day. The Japanese app wasn’t ready yet. …
Character Communication
When people find out that Pui, my fiancé, was born in Hong Kong and grew up speaking Cantonese there seems to always come a point in conversation when they ask, “So how closely related are …
New Scholars: Evan and Jeremy
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 …
Skritter is going to ACTFL
Every year the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL) holds their Annual Convention & World Languages Expo. The convention is a sort of super meeting of all foreign languages being taught in the United …
The Chinese Blogger Round-Up (Part 2)
Continuing on from last week’s post, here are some more great blogger profiles for your reading pleasure. Again, the Skritter team would like to send a huge thanks to all the bloggers who helped to …