Japanese Launch

Today as promised Japanese has officially launched! We've gotten several more textbooks and JLPT lists up since we first started Japanese, and we've been tweaking and improving it all around as well. There's always more we'll be doing to make it better and better, but having used it myself for months I believe it's well and ready to go and start being charged for. We hope you'll find it useful enough to justify our monthly fee!

The reading and definition practice help complete the Japanese learning process in particular, letting you practice words even if you don't need to learn the kanji for them, which is very common in the first years of study. The reading and definition practices are fast and efficient, and promote active learning as well. So in addition to launching Japanese, we have taken reading and definition practice out of beta and alpha. New users now have both on by default, so they come in learning all aspects of their vocabulary.

Thanks also to all the beta testers for Japanese. We've been getting lots of good feedback and ideas on how to make it better. We have plenty of things on the docket to test out; unfortunately time is always the scarcest resource here. But we'll get to them in time. Thanks for all your support!

Also, if you want to study both languages, there's no extra cost for doing so. Just for you ambitious learn-all-Asian-languages folks out there.

Now go learn some kanji.

Sounds, Demo

Just uploaded two new bits to the site. The first is sound effects! Blair has been working on these for the last few days. I've been so bold as to enable them by default, so please let us know what you think, which ones you like and dislike, and what other sounds you might like to hear. There are some sound effects depending on how long you practice, and there might be more later. (Update: you can turn them off in the practice page settings.)

The other is the first version of a new demo / tutorial to help new users figure out how to use Skritter and what it's all about. You can give it a shot, too. This one is very overdue.

Huge Amount of Newness

Things around the Skritter base are humming with activity. Blair and Garrett are mauling through assignments like hungry bears looking for kidsnacks in the woods. So here's what's new:

Changing the Challenge Reward If you've been on the homepage recently you might have noticed that the challenge reward we offered in our newsletter (the custom-made avatars) apparently doesn't motivate learning as well as other prizes, so we're going to let the winners of this month's contest pick their prize from amongst the higher-scoring categories. You can either have a t-shirt, mug, or water bottle (all emblazoned with a cute Skritter of course)! So, work towards your studying goal with the knowledge that if you win, you can pick a prize that you'll actually want.

New Front Page Video Way back in the day, we had a sort of front page teaser for Skritter. It had explosions, it had footage of writing, and it was phased out with our new front page, but we have created another one. Sadly, this one lacks explosions, but we hope it will interest people none the less. If you'd like to view it you'll have to check it out on youtube since it's hooked up the Google A/B testing and so may or may not show up for you. Let us know what you think so that we can improve!

Sign up/Sign in Pages Redesigned The sign up fields in the top right of the screen are just the tip of a bigger sign up interface overhaul. You can check out the new sign up page here. Say thanks to Garrett for that sweet implementation.

Tone Colors in the Flash Blair has fixed readings that appear in the flash during definition practice so that if you have the tone colors enabled, the colors now appear consistently in all instances of the reading. Nice work on that Blair.

Memory Leak Plugged Nick has fixed a large memory leak that caused the flash app to gradually eat up more and more memory and have performance problems. The problem would be most apparent if you left the practice page running for long periods of time or practiced like a maniac for 5 hours straight. So now you addicts will have a much better user experience into the 6th hour!

Language Switcher I just want to point out that I definitely called the controversy over the Chinese/Japanese flag language switcher. The ability to change languages back and forth anywhere on the site is nice, but I said, "Do you think anybody will mind the Chinese flag?" to which everyone just poo-pooed me. Ha! Well, now it's fixed and you can switch languages, but it did cause a stir. If you don't like the zh/ja switcher, hit the forums.

We're currently working on a demo for the front-facing parts of the site, after which we're starting in on a revamping of the pricing system. So for now, fare thee well, and by all means let us know through comments here and through the feedback system what you think of all these changes.

Passwords and Autocomplete

Hey all, minor note. We've changed the way logging in works for security and speed purposes, but it might break some of your guys' autocompleted passwords. Basically for all browsers except Firefox (because of the way different browsers store passwords), you'll have to retype in your password and let your browser store the new version for it to work.

This change in the login system also means for users who haven't logged in since September and who don't use clickpass, their password will no longer work at all, retyped in or not. This shouldn't be a problem for the vast majority of users, but if you want to get back to your account, you can use the recovery feature to get back in, and if you still have trouble let us know and we'll be glad to help you out.

That is all!

Newsletter, T-Shirt Winners, Forum Emails

The Skritter January Newsletter has just gone out! If you aren't subscribed and want to be, or vice versa, you can change your email settings. We'll be emailing the 43 T-shirt winners tomorrow. (43!)

The other night, I built a feature that has been waiting a while: watched forum topics. You can now click on the little envelope at the top right of a forum topic and get emailed whenever someone replies. The current icon is extremely great because icon-man George was sleeping when I built this. Perhaps now he will notice and replace it with something a bit bigger and more modern.


Another long overdue feature: if the word you're adding to the Skritter database is made up of characters which usually only have one pronunciation, then the pinyin for that word will be autofilled in the add-word widget. Sorry this took so long!


I've also tweaked the tone and grade buttons to make them more glassy, so that if a character pokes under them, you can still see it. Looks pretty cool to me, but there is disagreement in the base, so your thoughts are invited.

Hidden Readings, Progress Bars

Today, we uploaded two new features. One is a new prompt mode for writing prompts, where the reading (pinyin or kana) is hidden at first. This lets you key off the definition (and sometimes sound) instead of using the reading as a crutch. It's still experimental, so try it out, let us know what works, and think of ways it could work better for you. We used to call this "audio-only prompts", but when we realized that only a few prompts would be able to use it if you limited it to words where you could prompt with just the audio, we decided "hide readings" is a better name. You can enable it on the practice page settings menu.

The other is the addition of a dropdown progress bar in the Flash, so when a word is added, you can see what list and section it's coming from. It also shows you your progress through that section. Blair, one of our January interns, put this one together. As she quickly learns ActionScript, I wonder what I'll have her work on next--a voice recognition module perhaps? Antimatter?

We've made some other fixes, too, including reading/definition font fixes (let us know if there are still problems), transparent tone and grade buttons for less obscurity, proper forum RSS topic post selection, and more. There are still some unresolved bugs creeping around out there, but I'm after 'em like a toddler in a jewelry store.

JLPT 2,3 and 4 Are Up

I've just uploaded a new set of vocabulary to study: the Japanese Language Proficiency Test Lists! These are the Japanese version of the HSK lists, except the numbers are reversed (4, most basic, 1, most difficult). I've got the JLPT 1 list, but there are still some things to hammer out with it, so I'll save that for later, but it will come.

The lists have been ordered with the same algorithm created by Nick for sorting the HSK lists, which sorts based on frequency of usage and on their placement in textbooks. There are a few things I'll want to tweak with the sorting algorithm next time, when the next set of tests come out. They're reorganizing them into five levels instead of four, and we'll aim to have these new lists up on our site soon after they are finished, with upgraded sorting.

And finally, thanks to Michael Hominick at renshuu.org for providing these lists! We agreed to trade some of our lists so he has some more textbooks and I have these proficiency lists to save both of us some work. He also provided me with Kanji Kentei lists, which I will get to as soon as time allows! For now though, there are many pressing upgrades and features that need to get done, so I'm leaving some of this list making for later on. Never nothing to do here at Skritter headquarters, that's for sure.

A New Look and more Detail

Well, as you might have noticed, we've changed the look of the site. Several of you had mentioned that the grey background looked a little ... Atari circa 1989 ... desktop computer circa 1994 ... Netscape circa 1996 ... IBM, forever. So Chloe, our design consultant and aesthetic prognosticator, came up with a rad new design that you now see before you. Okay, yes, all we did was change the background color, add a gradient, and switch out the tabs for rounder versions. That said, I have to say that I'm darned impressed at how well it all came together. If you have thought or further suggestions, you should let us know.

In addition, reading and definition practice now has a little more style, and the prompts display more information. This is particularly evident in Japanese practice, which now shows the writing in the prompt where once there was only blankness.

Let me pause for a moment and note that both the new look and the prompt improvements were implemented by our very productive interns. Whoa, they've only been working with us for about 2 days, and they have already contributed to the site. So let's hear it for Blair and Garrett! They're rocking hard.

Current projects we're working on include this month's newsletter, a new login interface, and >finally< a tutorial to help people that are new to the site.

Here's a visualization of today's accomplishments:

We're Back!

Well actually, we've been back for a few days, but Scott returned earlier this afternoon, which means that the trifecta is complete and we can resume operating at full tilt.


Two updates from the Skritter HQ:

1) Our records show that a surprising number of people have taken us up on last month's practice-every-day challenge, and we will be sending out an email to alert everyone that qualifies at the end of the week. The T-shirts are ready and waitin' to be thrown out the hungry horde!

2) We have two interns that are helping us around the site for the duration of Oberlin's Winter Term (essentially the month of January). Today Garrett implemented a long-overdue site update that will go live shortly. Tomorrow Blair will get oriented and she can start sinking her teeth into the actionscript tome that is the practice page. Thanks to those noble souls for their assistance, and we look forward to giving them ample opportunity to impress everyone with their skillz.

新年快乐!