Although learning to write Chinese characters with a pen or pencil can really help you to remember how to read, and obviously write characters, sometimes it’s nice to change things up a bit!
It’s kind of fun to use your mouse or finger to ‘draw’ or write on your computer screen, which is exactly what you can do with Skritter!
CHINESE LEARNING PRODUCT TYPE: CHARACTER WRITING PLATFORM
Skritter is a handwriting recognition platform that allows you to practice writing Chinese (and Japanese) characters. Skritter corrects your mistakes if you write a stroke incorrectly and shows the stroke order to help you remember how to write and read the character.
Although this is the main feature of Skritter, it also tests your knowledge of the characters meaning, tone and reading. You can choose from a vast amount of ‘lists’ to study, including HSK, radicals and words from textbooks such as the ‘New Practical Chinese Reader’.
You can take studying on the go with Skritter’s app for iOS and Android too!
The Two White Chicks have used Skritter themselves, and have given their honest opinion on using the Skritter platform. If you’re already tried out Skritter, you can get 7-days free when you sign up for an account.
OUR FAVORITE FEATURES
- There’s a demo to try it out first
- Shows you how to draw each Chinese character
- Practice tracing Chinese characters with the correct stroke order before memorizing how to write them
- Choose from hundreds of vocabulary lists, or create your own
- Study statistics show your study streaks and other useful data to keep you motivated
- Choose to study simplified Chinese characters, traditional Chinese characters or you can even choose both, which is a feature we’ve never seen in any other Chinese character learning program
- You can study Japanese, too
- Mnemonic memory sentences are great and you can edit them to fit your own learning style
- Each character comes with a list of commonly used words including that character. This makes it easy to find ways to use the characters that you are studying.
- Useful example sentences
- Options to ‘ban’ characters that you already know
- Customise how many characters to study in one session
- ‘Drawing’ the tone is a nice addition
COULD BE BETTER
- Onboarding needs improvement. When you first start studying, there isn’t a tutorial so, in the beginning, it might be unclear what you need to do first. After a little trial and error, it gets easy in no time though.
- Character settings are a little confusing.
- Need to have some knowledge of Chinese characters, as there’s no real ‘teaching’ part
- How to move onto the next character was a little confusing
PRICING AND PRICE COMPARISON TO OTHER PRODUCTS
Find Skritter’s current pricing here.
Here’s a comparison of some other online Chinese writing platforms:
| Product | Price | Content |
| Skritter | $14.99 / $59.99 / $99.99 | 1 month / 6 months / 1 year |
| TrainChinese | $59.99 / $64.99 / $69.99 | 3 months / 6 months / 1 year |
DETAILS OF PRODUCT
Company: Skritter
Platform Type: Character Recognition
Free Trial: Try the demo or get 7 days when you sign up for an account
Cost: $14.99/per month to get unlimited studying of both Chinese and Japanese characters
If you’ve already used Skritter or check out of the demo, let us know what you think!