I'm just curious to know how you're using Skritter if you are a Chinese Pod student.

I came here from Chinese Pod and I LOVE this tool, it is helping me remember my Chinese Pod lessons!!! What Ken said is true - we need the full learning experience (verbal, written and visual) before we start to retain.

Anyway, the way I'm going through this (and it's a pretty slow process but I'm less concerned with speed and more concerned with just learning and retaining) is to listen to my Chinese Pod lesson, then download the character list into Skritter. Some of the words in the lesson aren't actually in the Skritter list, but that's okay. Then I practice writing out the entire dialogue (even the words not included in Skritter's lesson list). Once I've written the dialogue a few times I start practicing on Skritter.

I have not touched the supplementary dialogue at this point, I intend to do that after I hit a certain number of memorized lessons (ten is my goal - then I'll tackle the supplementary).

I am an ABSOLUTE newbie to Chinese. I have never taken a single class, but in just a few weeks ChinesePod and Skritter have gotten me to the point where I can introduce myself and carry on a VERY limited conversation. I'm pretty impressed with these two wonderful websites!!!

Oh! The reason I haven't tackled the supplementary is because I find random words with no context more difficult for me to learn. So I want to have a bit of a base before I go into random words.

I can't imagine just learning characters! My brain would not allow that.

So I'm curious, any other Chinese Pod members out there? How are you using Skritter? To supplement your Chinese Pod Lessons? Or seperately?

I do the same. I use Chinese-pod as the main source for Chinese and practice on the words/characters in Skritter. I listen to the pods on my daily Tokyo commuting, when at home I do the exercises. When ever I have time at home or at office i do skritter for the words. This is actually the fun part so I spend more time on skritter than on Cpod. I need to have the context so the combination of Cpod and skritter is perfect for me. I am also very pleased with both of those sites and can't study without them. The only thing i need to do in "real life" is the talking. That I practice with my wife and daughters :-)

Hey, yeah Skritter and cpod are a good combination. But I wouldn't worry about pouring over the transcript in too much detail. I tend to just add important sentences (not long ones) into a flash cards program (anki - google it), and then it'll shortly be effectively learnt.

I agree with you on the supplementary and the need to learn in context, I would usually skip them. Otherwise I would have to do my own research into the words which is pretty time consuming if it's on top of the podcast.

It'll be worth getting yourself some spoken practice too. Teacher on Skype or something? You don't have to actually learn too much if you don't want, you can just use it to practice your speaking/listening.

For me memorizing the entire dialogue is helping tremendously. Not just speaking but writing and reading the dialogue is slowly fitting the words into my head in a way that makes sense for me. :) Thankfully I've worked alone in studies enough that I know how my brain processes information.

Teacher on Skype? What is that?

I have real life talking practice too, my employer is Chinese and she happily corrects me if my tone and/or grammar is off so that's helpful too! Only, right now I'm a little too shy to practice on her too much. Because she IS so blunt about correction my poor ego gets a little bruised. ;)

A little bruised;-) You should hear how blunt my wife is, not to speak about my parents in law. They have no problems letting everyone know that my Chinese is worse than my 6 years old daughters. That is just part of the Chinese culture. It used to be like that even at language schools in China. Never felt so small. I have stopped bothering about it. I just face the reality, I am bad but I am improving:-)

@Mandarinboy what kind of work do you do in Tokyo, if you don't mind me asking?

I am an IT architect and currently I am working on migrating an Hitachi mainframe to an IBM equivalent in Sweden. And some 10 other projects. I see it more like I am in Japan and having fun though. I work with my hobby during days and study Chinese at night. Not bad.

@nickybr38 - A "Skype teacher" is a teacher who uses the voice software Skype to hold class. Skype to Skype calls are free, so the only fee to the student is the teacher's time. That is the arrangement I am currently using. She has her own website and her rates are better than average. Since it is a one woman operation, I have a large amount of freedom. If I just want to work on maintaining my spoken Chinese, that is fine. If I want to go over HSK 6 materials or an article with her that is also fine. I just have to make sure she knows what article/word list/ textbook I want to use.

I have never tried a normal Skype school, though. If I don't have the chance to go to South America, I suspect I will resort to using one at some point for learning Spanish.

This will sound very pathetic but I can barely afford my subscriptions to CP and Skritter... so a Skype teacher is out of the question. I'll stick with my strict employer. Haha. She bruises my ego but at least she's free of charge.

It doesn't sound pathetic. If I can't find a means of getting the cash together, I may end up learning Spanish by just about the same means as you are going for Chinese.

If I may ask, are you in China right now, or are you somewhere else but still trying to learn Chinese? If you are somewhere else, why are you trying your hand at Chinese?

I live in Canada. I'm learning Chinese (Mandarin more specifically) because I just think it's beautiful. Simple as that. :) In the past I studied Spanish, Greek and German for the same reasons but in the end I actually found those languages more difficult. It's funny but I'm having a much, much easier time with Chinese then I ever did with those. I think part of the reason is that it sounds like music to me and I'm a very musical person. :) The tones suit me perfectly! Each word is like a little song. Heh.

@Byzanti - I study in a similar way. I put characters and words I need to cram from either schoolbooks, Chinese novels, television series or Chinesepod into Skritter.

Furthermore, to strengthen the feeling for grammar and structure, I memorize short, significant sentences in Anki. The same for learning collocations, which help me a lot too.

How do you learn the sentences though? I usually create pinyin entries and just write up the characters for each entry as they show up in Anki. What's your take?

Hi,

I also take the time needed to write out the full dialogue of the Chinesepod lessons I study. I also understand why you don't study the supplementary section at the moment. When you are new to a level the degree of difficulty of that supplentary section can be a bit daunting, but it gets better once you have 20-30 lessons under your belt. The good thing about the supplementary is that you get 3 simple, clear contexts for the word you are learning.

Overall my study method is more or less the same as yours: first I listen to the lesson q few times; then I study the dialogue and try to copy the dialogue and the supplementary section by listening to the soundbites alone. When there is a new word I copy this a few times. Next, I add the lesson to Skritter and if I have enought time I will cram this list for a while. Then I mark the lesson as studied in Chinesepod.com and forget about it. Skritter will make sure that I will not forget the vocab and the characters. One last detail, I have chenged my language settings on skritter so that for any new wordthat is composed of several characters the individual characters are added too.

Marc

"Furthermore, to strengthen the feeling for grammar and structure, I memorize short, significant sentences in Anki."

Yep. This is basically all I do. One side in English, one side in hanzi. Translate the English and read the hanzi. I also occasionally add a few cloze deletion sentences together in one card when I've a few words which are very similar and I need to distinguish them (by seeing them in context).

@Byzanti; If that's what you practice in Anki, then what do you practice in Skritter? Only characters/words? Sentence memorization seems tedious for Skritter. Just curious~

Yeah. Short and snappy is best. A sentence can be short and snappy for anki, but it would kill for Skritter.

With Skritter, when I first started learning I went all out learning individual characters (1500ish, although in hindsight, 800+ would probably be enough), and used this as a base for subsequently learning words quickly.

Nowadays I don't explicitly study individual characters much, just words. I also tend to add the according anki sentence (with the word _ _ out) and often a picture to the custom definitions field. Re-enforces things a whole bunch.

@Byzanti; Just to be sure I understand correctly: I take it you don't write out the Anki entries in characters in order to keep them short and snappy. You're translating them to Mandarin in your head or saying them out loud, right? Thanks for your hints so far! They're very helpful to me.

Ah, sorry. Yep. I prefer to say them out loud where possible.

As long as I get the important bit that I need to remember right, then I'd mark it right.

Different people like different things though, so whatever works. Just don't bog yourself down.

*whisper* what is Anki??? *feels stupid*

http://ichi2.net/anki/

Oh! Thank you. :)