ChinesePod, New Lists, User’s Guide, Launch and Pricing

This is a long blog post! For those who prefer getting their information graphically, we have made a comic to give you the jist.

We’re very excited to announce that soon you will be able to study ChinesePod vocabulary with Skritter! We have been working with ChinesePod for several months, the first result of which is that ChinesePod users will be able to grab vocabulary from user created labels as well as the lessons emanating from the great Praxis. We have to give props to John Pasden and ChinesePod’s developer for providing access to their data to us and other sites who will be using the brand new ChinesePod API. It has been great working with these awesome people in Shanghai. We're putting the finishing touches on the system, and it should be available within the next few days.

More good news today: new textbook vocabulary lists are up. We’ve added lists for Ni Hao, Boya Chinese, Elementary Spoken Chinese, Chinese Through Tone and Color, Communicating in Chinese 1, and Chinese Link. We want to thank all the users that recommended the books and provided us with lists. You know who you are.

The third big change is the addition of a full fledged User's Guide, a Quickstart Guide, and a welcome page. Skritter has long suffered under the tyranny of too little documentation as well as too little direction for new users. Those days are drawing to a close. With these three documents and the soon-to-be completed tutorial system for the Try It page, we hope to destroy once and for all the confusing introduction to Skritter that many users have had. We want to thank in particular one of our dedicated users, Rachael, who gave us a lot of feedback and helped to make the User’s Guide more helpful for the good of the land.

So, lots of new features, but that’s not all the exciting news. We’ve been working on Skritter full time for almost a year now and we’re proud to announce that we will be launching the paid service in two weeks on Tuesday, May 12th. This means a lot of things for Skritter, so read on for details.

Firstly, every user that signs up will be given a two week free trial period with full access to Skritter. And if you have signed up by launch, you will receive four weeks instead of two as a token of our appreciation for putting up with all the bugs and being willing to work with us to improve the site. After your trial period ends, should you choose not to pay for Skritter, you won’t be able to add new words without an active subscription. But you’ll always be able to freely practice the words and characters you’ve already added. We won’t lock you in, and we want to encourage long term retention as much as possible.

By the end of May we anticipate we’ll have finished the custom list builder that will let you create and share your own lists. In the near term we will also be adding definition and pinyin practice, a mnemonics sharing system, greatly improved scheduling, teacher-oriented tools, exporting learning data, and character decompositions. As they are developed, each of these features will be available for no extra charge to paying users. Also on our short term development list is the Japanese beta version of Skritter. We’ll keep that free for everyone until its launch as well. We’ve got hundreds of feature ideas beyond that, too. Skritter will be yet more efficient than can be imagined!

Regarding pricing: up to this point, we have been intentionally quiet about the details for a lot of different reasons. We’re finally ready to announce what we’ll be charging for access. You can check out the pricing chart here. The upshot is that we’re trying hard to balance financial feasibility and affordability for users. We think the current price structure leaves us enough room to make sustainable revenue without pricing ourselves out of students' range. If you just can’t afford Skritter, let us know and we’ll work something out.

In addition to individual subscriptions, we have also worked out what we are charging for institutional site licenses. We’re offering college and university site licenses as well as licenses for K-12 schools. Because we are willing to work with institutions and site licensing is a bit more complex than selling individual subscriptions, I would encourage anyone interested in further details to contact me. I would be happy to provide you with an official quote, let you know what exactly the licenses include, and what our installation timeline would be.

Although we’re pretty settled on our pricing choices, we welcome feedback and would be very interested to hear what people think.

That’s a pretty long blog post, but there’s a lot to cover. Thanks again for everyone’s help and patience in building Skritter. We look forward to continuing helping you be the smartest Chinese students on the planet!

New Vocab List Page Design

Hey everyone, we just uploaded a new system for controlling your vocabulary lists. If you're having trouble seeing it, try clearing your browser's cache. There are no new features in this new design, but we're right now trying to get our site in general more intuitive to use and make it easier for new users to get going on their studies. There are a handful of things in the works towards this goal, but the vocabulary list page has been one of the most commented on areas of our site in terms of weak usability. Go have a look, let us know what you think of the new visuals.

Also, if there are other parts of the site you find counter intuitive or took a little while to figure out, let us know. Right now the major things we're working on:

A User Guide: detailed info for the whole site, all features
A Quick Start Guide: a quick run through of how to get going along with some advice on how to get the most out of Skritter, so new users can do so quickly.
More guided Try It page: This, one of our newest additions to the site, isn't yet doing what it's supposed to do, so we'll be retooling it to be a more guided walk through of a typical Skritter day.

These are what we're focusing on. What other areas of the site could really use some work from a usability standpoint?

More lists soon

I've been collecting more textbook lists and am working on processing them, disambiguating their variant characters, adding missing words, and getting them online. In the next week or so, I'll be uploading all of those, as well as all the characters that have been requested so far.

So if you have a textbook list that you'd like to see on Skritter but haven't sent me yet, plop it over my way and I'll include it.

I've fixed a lot of bugs this week, although many persist. A new User's Guide is emerging from George's brain. Scott's working on a cool new feature. And you guys are learning a lot of characters! Several of you have spent more than a hundred hours on Skritter, and many have learned more than 1700 characters. Intense. We will continue to make it more and more efficient until the characters flow into your heads faster than a striking viper.

New sounds

Thanks to the sinoknights over at ChinesePod, we now have a new set of Mandarin syllables. They sound great and are complete (except for neutral tones, which are hard to do in isolation, and erhua).

The old sound set was dilapidated trousers. The new one is pooled summer dew. This has been a long time in coming. Enjoy!

We put up the Genius on Friday, and it's stabilizing nicely. Scott and George also planted a new front page and a try-it page, with a cooler demo video, more explosions, and some of your smiling, testifying faces--thanks, guys!

Genius--almost

The Genius is done and in final testing. I won't upload it until the new front page goes up, possibly tomorrow or Saturday, but I'm excited so I'll describe how awesome it's going to be.

What the Genius does is make loading scheduled items much smarter. The Kitten still figures out what you know and schedules words for review, on the server side. But on the client side, the Genius loads words for you to study and keeps track of the current batch.

The ramifications are many and powerful:

• We can now start to add words while reviewing, instead of only after reviews are cleared. You can control whether and how soon this happens.
• You can now overpractice, either a little (clearing words that would have become due shortly) or a lot (disabling adding and reviewing the most ready words as long as you want).
• Words are now sorted nearly perfectly by how ready they are (much better!).
• You can choose your target retention rate, with 95% as default.
• Our retention rate is now your real retention rate, instead of "ratio of prompts answered correctly." It's about twice as high, so old 90% is roughly new 95% and old 80% new 90%.
• The "to review" and "added" bars should be more responsive.
• The first word will load faster and you should see fewer loading delays.
• Everything is much more efficient on our servers and your connection.

Most fetching! This isn't up yet, because the new front and try-it pages aren't quite done. We will cheer on Scott and George as they heroically smash their way toward the finish, yes.

Improved recognition

I've just fixed most of the problem stroke recognizers. This includes tweaks to tone recognition, and you can draw a circle to do a neutral tone (or any shape that ends near where it starts, really).

I've just focused on overly strict recognizers that I found, making them more liberal. I've also re-educated all the strokes that were prone to giving false "stroke backwards" messages (that I know of).

How does it taste? This has been a long time in coming and I'm excited. I hadn't actually tuned any recognizers since November! Let me know if you're still having problems getting any strokes recognized. There will be some strokes that will accept weird squigs (like if you make the hook the wrong way), but in my experience that's been much less of a problem than expected.