Reorganized All, Lurking Decomps

I have reorganized the site navigation.
The old tabs, of which there were three sets depending on which page you were on (and sometimes none), are gone, replaced by a nav pill that's always there and always ready to take you where you want to go. We've got breadcrumbs everywhere. The home page is now a proper home for all, and the resources page and help/FAQ are no longer buried!

In other news, the first stage of character decompositions are done. I've been practicing with them, and they're awesome. We're not turning them on yet because we want to put the mnemonics system online at the same time (they go together), but they are close! We have decompositions for 20,000 characters in the system. I'll say more when the mnemonics are ready, too.

List Page Reorg, Remove Lists from Study

More vocabulary management system improvements! About a month ago we introduced the new practice navigation page, allowing people to study a single list or section and view their upcoming items. Now it's time for part two of the 2010 spring series of vocabulary upgrades: a cleaned up and better organized vocabulary list page.

We ditched the old hard to notice and kind of confusing "Advanced" tab in favor of a dropdown box with nice short descriptions of all the various things you can do with a list. We're also using a new dialog overlay system for many of these actions which you'll see more of in various parts of the site as we find more uses for it. And overall the interface has been re-thought out, so as to be as intuitive as possible.


And one feature has seen a major upgrade: removing words from a single list. If you want to stop studying a list, you can now clear out just those words if you want to. By default Skritter keeps all your words so that you don't forget them, but if you really want to focus on other things you can remove a list without also removing words held in common with other added lists. So if you add lists A and B, which share some words, and then you remove list A, words that are also in B will not be removed.


Next on my list of vocabulary overhauls is the list editing system. We often get questions on how the existing list editing system works, so my goal is to greatly simplify the process and also make it much more scalable. The list editor gets pretty slow when working on larger lists, so that will be resolved. And then after that comes some big queue upgrades...

Much to look forward to!

兔头 (Rabbit Heads) and other odd foods

The city 大同 (Dàtóng) in 山西 (Shānxī) Province has a rabbit head street. It’s lined with 兔头 (tù tóu, rabbit head) (pictured on the left, top) restaurants that offer up the local specialty at different levels of spiciness. I felt a bit grossed out by the huge barrels of cooked rabbit heads sitting out on the street in front of the restaurants, but curiosity eventually overcame me and I ended up going in and ordering a couple of spicy rabbit heads. I sat down not really knowing how to approach eating a rabbit head. My friend showed me how it’s done: first you gnaw the meat off the cheek areas, then grab the mandibles and crack it open so you can bite out the tongue, and the final touch if you are really hardcore is to bite into the top of the head and suck out the brain.

After taking the initial plunge and eating rabbit heads, I felt inspired to try a bunch of other strange foods. Some of the ones that I ended up trying include: pig’s feet, chicken’s feet, goose feet, duck neck (pictured on the left, bottom), duck tongue, cow brain, cow stomach (pictured on the left, middle), fish flotation bladder, donkey meat hotpot, stinky tofu, and dog meat. Some of the ones I still haven’t tried include: roasted scorpions on a stick and drunken shrimp. If you subscribe to Chinesepod you can check out a great advanced lesson on strange Chinese foods, 古怪食物

At some point during my first month in China I came up with a special ordering strategy: I would only order things on the menu with names I didn’t understand. The process was surprising, hit or miss, and a whole lot of fun. Sometimes I knew the meaning of the food names on the menu character-by-character without knowing the combined meanings. For example, at one of my first meals I decided to order 牛白叶 (niú bái yè), which sounded harmless to me. The name looked like “Cow white leaf”. I thought to myself, “sounds like a beef dish with some exotic vegis on the side”. For my 饮料 (yǐnliào, drink) I ordered 雪碧 (xuěbì) which I understood character-by-character to mean “Snow Jade”. So I thought to myself, “sounds like an exotic island style mixed drink.” My little pocket dictionary didn’t have 雪碧 as an entry so I was clueless as to the combined meaning. I was pretty surprised when the waiter brought out my meal which consisted of a plate of cow stomach (pictured on the left, middle) and a sprite！

You probably already know if you’ve ordered food at a 地道 (dìdao, authentic) Chinese restaurant that Chinese menus are difficult to get a handle on because of the huge variety of foods and local specialties. A good way to start working on reading Chinese menus is to first learn the general menu categories. You’ll often see 肉类 (ròu lèi, meat category)，蔬菜 (shūcài, vegetables)，汤 (tāng, soups)，饮料 (yǐnliào, drinks)，主食 (zhǔshí, staple food). The 主食 is usually rice, noodles, or 馒头 (mántou, steamed buns). In 山西 where I lived the 主食 was usually served last in the meal when I would usually be feeling completely stuffed from all of the other food. It might also be helpful to add some general food vocabulary to your skritter study program. I’d recommend this custom list: How To Order Chinese Food (Ordering Guides) provided by Skritter user Lyons.

So for all of you skritter users out there - I’m wondering what strange foods have you all tried in China? Does anyone have other tips for getting started with Chinese menu reading?

List Tagging

Ever since we introduced custom lists last July, allowing people to make and share their own lists, several hundreds have been published for everyone to use, and countless more have been made just for personal use. And as the number of lists has grown, it's also become clearer how much we need some sort of organization system just to sift through them all. We added a simple search engine but that still wasn't enough. So today we're introducing a list tagging system.

We decided to make it as open and straightforward as possible. Any list that is generally available can be tagged, including any ChinesePod list. Anyone can tag these lists, or remove tags as well. Hopefully with this range of freedom, we'll be able to quickly build a nice corpus of tags and browsing through all the lists we have will be made much easier. We'll see how it goes and probably modify it depending on how well it works.

To start tagging, go to any list page and click the edit tags link in the upper right corner of the page. It's very simple to add and remove tags, and you can add several at once by separating with commas. Any mistakes you make can easily be deleted.

To start browsing, go to the tags page which has a tag cloud so you can quickly look through the most popular tags. It's also linked to from the vocabulary navigation page. It's a little empty right now to be sure, so let's get tagging!

Summer Intern Wanted (Software development)

Skritter is hiring one more paid intern this summer to do software development. If you love coding, are smart, and are available this summer, then we want you!

You get to work on any part of Skritter that you want. Web dev with Django and App Engine, handwriting or voice recognition in Flash, machine learning in Python, modeling memory with applied math, improving our web design and usability, adding social features, maybe even writing mobile apps--pretty much whatever you're into.

We put you in a house near ours with two other interns (both are cool guys--one is Maksym returning from last summer), pay for your living expenses, teach you how to make Skritter better, give you $4800 for 3 months, and cover your living costs and airfare. You bring your computer, work hard, hang out with us, and help us grow our business. It's a lot of fun, so get in touch with us!

Reading bettered, quick access to Scratchpad

We've recently made Chinese reading practice look cooler, color tones, be clearer about when it doesn't have focus and which syllables in your answer are incorrect, grade you properly if you use the show button, not let you accidentally backspace off the page, and some other tweaks. I've also moved it from alpha to beta, and soon it'll be out of beta and on by default for new users. If you haven't checked it out yet, give it a try!

(Grouping reading prompts together so you don't have to switch between keyboard and writing works well sometimes, but not so well when adding new words; I'll be working on that yet.)

I've also made improvements to Chinese hidden reading mode, such that each syllable is hidden and revealed individually, instead of the whole pinyin revealing at once after the first character. You can click the last pinyin bubble to see them all. The more I use hidden reading mode, the more I like it and the less dependent I become on the pinyin. So turn that on, too, and give it a try! Question: do you think hidden reading should be enabled by default for new users?

One more thing: you can now get to the Skritter scratchpad at www.skritter.com/scratchpad and dump some words in there if you want to just try something out. (We don't have a link up yet, but for now you can get to it there.) It's available even if you're not logged in, too: free.

Take the Skritter Survey, Chat, Practice Nav

Our basic tactic for improving Skritter can neatly be described as follows: listen to your problems and solve them. In the spirit of this method, we've created a short survey we would really like you to complete. We ask lots of polls, but because of the multiple choice short-hand format, we can't ask some of the questions we've been really dying to have answered. For instance, the poll widget doesn't really allow us to ask you what you think the most frustrating part of Skritter is or what your first impressions of the site were. So, if you have 5 minutes, we would really appreciate your feedback. All you have to do is click here to check it out.

In other news, apart from fixing a ton of bugs, Nick has re-enabled the chat function and made it so you can toggle it on or off. You may remember that we tried a chat system a while back, and because of some bugs, people didn't like it that much, which is why it now defaults to off. However, now if we're online and you have a problem, need to ask a question, or have a suggestion and can't wait for email, just click on the "chat" link on the footer and give us a piece of your mind! We've been having fun chatting with new and existing users, so feel free to use the chat system and get in contact any time.


The other cool thing that's happened over the last week is that we've updated the appearance of the practice nav. When we first put it up, it looked sort of like the wrong end of a horse, but it's slowly improving. We're not done with it yet; we have yet to add two small features, but it's getting very close now.