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by simc 6269 days ago
I'm a serious student of Chinese. Would I pay for this? Maybe if it was cheap, but probably not. The stroke order thing is useful, and that is the only reason i'd use it. It just revealed to me the while I was writing the strokes for 我 in the right order I was writing the first stroke the wrong way, which was interesting I guess. However, your stroke order for 好 seems wrong (the woman radical upward vertical stroke, should come before the horizontal, according to Learning Chinese Characters Volume 1).

However now I'm not a absolute beginner any more so I have a reasonably good intuition about stroke order, but if I write them in the wrong order I guess I don't really care very much.There are already many good spaced repetition programs like Anki, which are free. I've implemented my own system based of Leitner flashcards for the Nintendo DS (I haven't released it), which is what I use.

1 comments

We allow any stroke order for 女 because a lot of people write it non-standardly in order to make it look better.

Skritter's deal is to make spaced repetition easy (premade textbook lists, no need to grade yourself) and efficient (taking advantage of domain-specific knowledge), while building writing practice into it. Certainly if you're making your own SRS, you probably don't need the ease of use. Your Nintendo DS app sounds cool--are you planning on releasing it, or is it a personal project?

I am planning to put it up, but it is basically does what I want it to now so I am not going to put a lot effort into it to go the extra mile for consumer grade usability. You have to create a pcx file for every question/answer card, which makes it a bit difficult to use if you can't program a script to render them from a csv file. I was thinking of putting the program up with a couple of premade decks like remembering the kanji and perhaps some other textbooks.