Skritter developments

[imron]

45 minutes ago, sekkar said:

Although at this point I have more than 6000 words added on Skritter, so switching is not really an option anymore.

Why not?

 

You'll either know the words already - in which case it doesn't matter if you don't add them again

 

or

 

You won't know the words but the words are not useful words (useful being defined by how often you come across it in context) - in which case it doesn't matter if you don't add them again

 

or

 

You won't know the words but the words are useful - in which case you can add them again when you encounter them.

 

Either way, you lose nothing by starting again.  See here for further discussion.

[DavyJonesLocker]

Just downloaded skitter. It has come a long way from the early days . I always thought it was too expensive but if you're using it everyday and really want to write characters I can see the appeal especially now they include many known text books.  

 

I just write (well scribble) to aid recognition of characters so that can be easily done in pleco or anki with a custom deck. 

[sekkar]

21 minutes ago, mungouk said:

I'm curious @sekkar... did you use Skritter to learn the vocabulary, or did you learn it first some other way and then used Skritter to learn how to write it?

 

Working on HSK levels on Skritter, working towards the deadline for the exam, I found I just wasn't learning the vocab fast enough when I was having to learn strokes as well.  In the end I scrapped my lists, focused on learning to read/recall faster using memrise, and then later started again from zero on Skritter, learning to write words/chars I already knew.

I would say my first encounter of a word would typically be from Skritter. I started using Skritter before taking classes, so later when I was doing both in parallel most of the vocab introduced in the class I had already studied using Skritter. I do think it's important to get more "input" than just Skritter though. At least for me personally, having studied a word in Skritter is not the same as fully knowing how to use/understand that word. Especially when the vocab starts to get more complex or abstract.

 

Learning how to write will definitely take a lot more time than just learning how to read/understand a word. I don't see anything wrong with the way you do it. After all, lots of people don't bother to learn how to write at all.

 

34 minutes ago, mungouk said:

Second question: Did you do HSK exams in sequence?   I'm also curious how people manage the exponential increase in words/chars you have to learn as you move up the levels, particularly after HSK 3. Does it become easier to learn vocab as you go along because you get better at learning?  (Learning strategies, know more radicals, using already-known chars etc.)

I studied in Taiwan, so I did the TOCFL instead of the HSKs, but the TOCFL also has a large increase in vocab need between levels.

 

There's two different points to be made here I think, one is that you have to accept that going from HSK5 to HSK6 will simply take a lot more effort and time than going from 3 to 4. But it's definitely true that learning new vocab gets easier the more you learn. I think it might have been around 1500+ stuff started to get easier for me. You start seeing less and less new characters, you recognize more radicals and stroke order stops being an issue. After 2500 words my biggest problem is not the writing itself, but more how to distinguish between two words with a very similar meaning.