Tone Sandhi: Tone Changes for the Character “不” Tone Sandhi: The Third Tone The Neutral Tone Studying words on Skritter I’m sure you’ve noticed when “不要” (don’t want) gets written as “bú yào” rather than …
Japanese Grammar
Slurping soup for politeness, reading a book right to left, the side of the road you drive on, and the emergency telephone number in Japan (119) are not the only things “backwards”-seeming to Americans, but …
Culture Corner: 少壮不努力，老大徒伤悲
Today on the Skritter blog I’m proud to introduce the first entry in the Culture Corner series. Culture Corner was inspired in a large part by an ongoing conversation I’ve been having with Olle over …
Making good use out of frequency lists
Last time on the Skritter blog I talked about the pitfalls of context free learning and list overdose. Near the end of the post I did, however, mention that these mega lists can be used …
Kanji vs. Hanzi
As anyone reading this probably knows, the concept of kanji first originated from China way back when, and there is a whole other theory on how Chinese characters themselves may have been created, which involves …
List Overdose
I promised Nick I wouldn’t be a grump while writing this post, so let’s kick things off with a tragically funny comic I found on Laowai Comics: Who really wants to be like Harry? (image …
Chinese Character Acquisition: A Native Perspective
This week’s blog post is in response to a question submitted by one of our Skritter members, Drew. He wrote us and asked: “I am always fascinated by how native Chinese speakers identify characters by referencing the pronunciation and …
Japanese Language Brain
This post has a Japanese version below. Feel free to practice by reading it first! There is something fascinating about the way the Japanese-language-speaking brain works. It has to do with the way that the brain …
Skritter iPad and iPhone 5 App Launched
The iPad apps are out! Both Skritter Chinese and Skritter Japanese have been updated to 2.0 to provide universal iPad support. They also capitalize on the taller iPhone 5 and iPod touch 5th gen screens, …
An ACTFL 2012 Recap
Skritter has attended the ACTFL three times, and every time I organize it, I forget how busy it is to do the conference right before Thanksgiving! Jake and I were in attendance in Philadelphia last …