Hi, I'm quite a newbie here as well as studying Chinese. (It's been a little more than a week now!) I accidentally ran across skritter last Friday, and I've tried out since. Hell, it's free trial! And I'm a language learning geek. (I feel like I'm spending more time to search for tools than study languages.)

Here I am. After 4 days of trial, my Chinese characters learned has reached 350, and I felt really great when I tried writing some basic characters, like 我,那,or 做, on a paper. I didn't have any trouble to write them. Amazing!

Why am I so amazed? Here is a confession to make. I've teaching myself Japanese almost for 3 years now. I'm quite confident in Japanese conversation. I've been focusing on listening, speaking and recently reading. Writing has never been a part of my study journal. However, now I started feeling stupid for my Japanese lacking writing skill. I mean, at all. When I write a memo in Japanese, all the characters I use are hiragana. It looks like someone who studied Japanese for a month wrote them.

So.

I will keep subscribing to skritter even after free trial. Maybe I need to brush up on my Japanese characters as well. Well, 'brush up' might not be an appropriate word for it.


Huge thanks from Korea. :)

Welcome, youngbin! Sounds like you're well on your way to language pro-ness: you just have to add in the characters and then you'll be good to go. Skritter will go up to 250mph on kanji if you already know the other parts of Japanese.

How many Chinese characters did you know before you started on Skritter?

@nick

I would say easily around a hundred. I'm from Korea. Even if we don't use very often Chinese characters anymore, they are still big parts of Korean language. And all Korean students have to take a certain amount of hanzi (We call it hanja. :D) classes at school. In fact, I should have known better than a hundred considering a few boring years at school. The fact that I'm quite comfortable with stroke orders also might have been helpful.

But you may be able to guess from the differences between Chinese characters in Chinese and Japan. Korea has some different ways to read and use them. It can't be easy to know 3 different ways of reading characters. Fortunately, I somehow found it interesting and worth to study. hehe. :)

欢迎!
When I was in Korea my colleague mentioned that Koreans all have a Hanzi name which corresponds to your Korean name, is that right?

For me, my Chinese name was the first and pretty much the only thing that I knew how to write in Chinese for quite a while!

@Neil

That's right most of times. The majority of Korean people prefer names that correspond to Chinese characters as traditionally all Korean have been doing since the beginning of Korean history. Some people choose to name their babies with pure Korean over traditional ones.

Mine is 李英玭. I don't know how to read it in Chinese (li ying ?), but it goes 'Lee(more like Yi in terms of pronunciation) Young Bin' in Korean. No tones. XD

I definitely know how to write these 3 characters at least. :)

According to unihan, the pronunciation of 玭 is either Pi2 Pian2 or Pin2. But none of the proper dictionaries I have has an entry for it.

I don't know if these are proper dictionaries, but they seem to agree that it's pin2 in Mandarin. The first one suggests its meaning is "pearl" and it's a variant of 琕:

http://tool.httpcn.com/Html/Zi/30/PWRNTBCQKOMEKOAD.shtml
http://www.zdic.net/zd/zi/ZdicE7Zdic8EZdicAD.htm

Mad props to Young Bin for studying at least three super hard languages. Anything else beyond English, Chinese, and Japanese? Maybe you want to study Arabic or Finnish too? ;)

James

@Byzanti @jww1066

Thank you all for having spent time to look it up! Now I know how to introduce my name properly in Chinese. I found the last character somewhat rare to be used in names or in general. My father gave me my name, and I don't know why he chose that specially rare character.

I beg to differ with James, by the way. Japanese and Chinese can be super hard for western people, but for me - Korean, it's relatively a lot easier than English. China, Japan and Korea have similar historical backgrounds about Chinese characters, and share quite many words. Even if I have to learn how to read them, I already know what they mean. Tones are painful, but some pronunciations are really similar to Koreans' because those Korean words originally came from Chinese and my ancestors imitated the sounds when they brought them into Korean society.

For example, 温度 - wendu (Chinese) ondo (Japanese) ondo (Korean)

Interesting, huh? :)

I indeed want to study more languages. After I feel like I am at a decent level of Chinese, I want to learn Spanish or French. :D


Youngbin.

@youngbin That makes sense. For English speakers Chinese, Korean, and Japanese are supposed to be among the hardest to learn. I read that for speakers of Asian languages, French is supposed to be particularly hard for some reason. Are you planning on learning French and/or Spanish for travel? French is useful in France, some parts of Africa, and a couple of other places, while Spanish is useful all across the Americas, even in the U.S. and Brazil.

Spanish is one of the easier Romance languages, by the way; its pronunciation is very regular, the phonetics are simple, and the grammar is pretty straightforward. And you generally don't have to speak much Spanish at all to have a conversation with Latinos; they're happy whenever anyone makes an attempt. The big challenge will probably be some of the consonant sounds. My mother (a native English speaker) is still struggling with "r" and "rr", while my Venezuelan wife still makes fun of my "ll" even though I've been studying Spanish for several years.

James

I don't speak any Korean yet, but that's why I'm here. Thankfully have been able to get to various places here in Seoul using the few Kanji I have seen as landmarks. Quite useful.

@JesseR You are in Seoul? Cool. :) If you are interested in learning languages including Korean, we need to check this meetup out. http://www.meetup.com/languagecast/ This is a meetup I'm organizing. I hope this doesn't look like too advertising. ^-^; Many friends in our meetup are already fluent at Chinese and Korean!