[cvboss]

Nihao! Good application, however I would like to see more instruction/tutorial how it works, since it's asking me to draw, but I am not sure what to draw, since I don't know that symbol and I would like to learn it.

ps/ I am interested in learning Chinese, however I am not sure I would pay at that point... Need to see incentives/success stories.

Good luck guys!

[gsaines]

Hey cvboss, thanks for giving it a spin!

Yeah, we really do need an instructional demo video on the "try it page." We actually just got the front page up, so new instructional demo videos and the like are on the way. It's good to know people actually want them, and sorry for any confusion.

Regarding you interest in seeing success stories or incentives, we are going to conduct a study next semester with a big batch of students so that we can make claims about the efficacy, is that the sort of thing you're looking for ("With Skritter, you can learn character 44% faster than with traditional methods, see our study") or would it be more enticing to see small narratives from users about how much its helped them?

[briansmith]

"With Skritter, you can learn character 44% faster than with traditional methods, see our study"

What are your criteria are for verifying the validity of the study? I've proofread lots of graduate papers about studies of second language acquisition and in almost every case the studies are summarized the same way: the results are (un)promising but no definite conclusions can drawn because the sample size was too small and/or there was too strong of a selection bias and/or there were some other significant flaws in the study. A study that would justify such a bold claim would be, as far as I can tell, a landmark study in the field--likely worthy of a Ph.D. People could probably get Ph.D.s just for studying your study! :)

[nwinter]

Control group vs. Skritter group, track the time they spend spend studying characters specifically, give them a huge quiz at the end of the semester--not enough? You're right that we can't get a large sample, but we can get a large effect because the Skritter method will drastically favor long term retention.

[briansmith]

I, personally, would only feel comfortable making quantified claims like that if they were verified to be statistically significant. I asked some SLA researchers what would be required to get a statistically significant result and their responses were really discouraging. It's really hard to get definite results even with huge student populations across multiple schools. Because of what they told me, I dropped the idea of making such claims about my own software. Instead I'm going to market it a different way.

I think many people will be interested in the results of your study. Do you know when/where the results will be published?

[nwinter]

No, we can't even start it until next semester. I did do a smaller study last year that showed average writing retention rates of 38%, and it'll be easy to destroy that. Maybe if SLA research is too tight to penetrate, we can still go the transparent web data presentation route.

[girk]

If you're interested in getting more students on board to take part of initial group to be tracked, feel free email me at melgirk at the only email service worth using.

[cvboss]

I am not sure buddy, but it would be nice to see how it fits or replaces(?) the traditional approach from a high level perspective :)

[nwinter]

We don't have a lot of stats yet, but I'm at 1700 characters after 60 hours of practice, and I probably could only write 600 when I started.

[rms]

Isn't that pretty dramatic? Do you think you're a better than average case because you also wrote the program?

The Supermemo technique should be good at keeping the pace up to get to that magic 6000 character level. Once you get a lot more data I would think you would have something worth publishing in journals of education and that could be a very nice PR opportunity for you, showing that your software dramatically improves the time needed to become fluent in Chinese.

[nwinter]

Yes, I'm probably the fastest on paper because I avoid some of the quirks with the time tracking system. Our top normal user hit 2000 characters essentially from writing scratch (had some reading knowledge) in 100 hours, but now he's at 2200 characters / 180 hours because of some crazy quest to hit 98% retention or some such.

6000 characters is very extreme. I think 3000 is a more magic target.

I expect we can produce some very sexy stats, once we build a data analysis framework for it. Do you think we could publish just based on our online practice data, without doing a more traditional study?

[rms]

Ah, right, I couldn't remember what the level for basic fluency was.

As for publication, I'm really not sure. I think it would depend on you finding someone else's data for Chinese language learning for comparison purposes. There's probably some conference somewhere you can present at, if nothing else.

[girk]

The level for basical fluency is 800 characters. Research done has shown that by knowing these 800 characters (which have been specifically determined) will allow you to read 80% of all Chinese ever written.