ChinesePod and Skritter are now officially in a partnership. For ChinesePod users (premium and above), this means you will soon start seeing the Skritter writing practice “scratchpad” with your other ChinesePod study tools.
I first met the three guys behind Skritter at last year’s ACTFL conference in Orlando. In a room full of boring textbooks, their innovative product immediately drew me in. Right away, I was thinking, “ChinesePod needs to team up with these guys.” We first started working together by building support for ChinesePod users on Skritter. By building an API that Skritter could use to access ChinesePod vocabulary data, we were supporting ChinesePod subscribers offsite. With this new partnership, we’ll finally be supporting ChinesePod users on ChinesePod with Skritter tools. We’ll also be working closely going forward, creating more and more cool, useful Chinese study tools.
For those of you unfamiliar with Skritter, allow me to give a brief introduction. Skritter’s “scratchpad” is the core of its writing practice service. The scratchpad uses Flash to provide on-screen character writing practice with built-in corrective feedback. The immediate feedback and character management functionality makes Skritter superior to simple pencil/paper repetition (and it doesn’t kill trees!). It works fine with a mouse, but for a truly impressive demonstration, a writing tablet is best. You have to try out the scratchpad to really understand how good it is, but here are some screenshots of the scratchpad in action:
You can expect to see Skritter scratchpad functionality start appearing on ChinesePod by the end of the month. This Sunday on the News and Features podcast you’ll also get to hear the voices of the guys behind Skritter.
Watch this space; more exciting stuff is coming… In the meantime, we’d love to hear your ideas about what ChinesePod and Skritter can work on together to help you learn Chinese better.
Helena on 
Ivor on 
Sandra Rosenzweig on 
21 Comments
This is fantastic news. I used Skritter during the beta and was very impressed. It made it into my list of top tools for studying Chinese. Unfortunately when they started charging it meant that I would be spending more than I had budgeted for learning Chinese and I stopped using them.
Proper integration with ChinesePod is great from a price point of view, but the real excitement comes from bring all these excellent tools together in one place. Really looking forward to it.
I tried Skritter a few months ago, and as much as I enjoyed it, I wasn’t ready to pay for something I can do more accurately with a pencil and a piece of paper. It’s a great thing that it’s gonna be integrated with Chinesepod.
just one word:
AWESOME!
I tried Skritter a few months ago and really liked the innovative approach. However, already paying for Chinesepod and having problems with the UI made me stop using it. I also failed to understand the necessity of counting all the time the progress/minute or similar. Great if it comes to Chinesepod, as writing practice was still lacking. I hope the Skritter core gets a more user (not full time student user) friendly interface.
This is great news – and I think it’s a great complement to the rest of the Chinesepod suite of tools. Nice work!
I’m not a fan of the mouse as a writing tool. Now that Cpod has this functionality I’d be interested to explore ways to use the Mac’s touchpad, or to buy a tablet that works properly.
This is great news
I am a user of chinesepod and skritter,am I paying one too much ?
This is great news – Skritter is a great idea well executed by people passionate to make it easier to learn Chinese. We have recommended them in our FAQ for some time now. Thumbs up!
Thank a lot for this tool, it will help us in our mandaring studies.
Muchas gracias por esta herramienta, nos ayudara en nuestros estudios de mandarin.
Fabulous. I found Skritter during its beta phase, and subscribed as soon as it went live. It is revolutionary in its ability to help with learning character writing. I have been using it side by side with Chinesepod on a daily basis for a couple months now. I wanted to make sure that writing the characters on screen would actually translate into the ability to write on paper, so I started using the Chinesepod dialogues for “dictation” and my writing skills are definitely improving in line with my Skritter progress. So, I’m thrilled with the alliance!
Perfect! I use Skritter and it’s great. The benefits of Cpod and Skritter under one website is great. I just hope when I purchase my iphone that it will be possible to use all the features through the iphone.
Keep up all the good work Cpod and Skritter!!
Great idea!
I have been using Skritter and it’s really fun. Almost addictive. Can’t wait to use it on CPod. I always thought my characters looked ok, but it’s good to be corrected and get the proportions right!
Can’t wait to see how this integrates with the iPhone / iPod Touch screen and being able to search for characters based on drawing recognition.
Exciting news! Looking forward to the new functionality
Good luck with the implementation!
Finally, there are a few Chinese learning web sites that writing tablets similar to Skritter. Glad to see this tool. Probably the best tool for practicing Chinese or Japanese characters.
yes, please add the skritter functionality to the cpod iphone app.
Will it be possible to access all Skritter vocabularies in the ChinesePod interface or will this only work for ChinesePod lesson sets? Very cool anyway!
This would have been an amazing tool to have when I first started learning to write Chinese. Instead of having to write out the characters over and over again in class, we could have just done it this way. Good choice, ChinesePod, to integrate with this product!
Fantastic news! I am still in my two week trial phase with Scritter and was definitely going to buy it. For me it is so nice to see my progress on a graph, makes you feel like you are actually making progress slowly towards a level where you will be able to read without help.
I hope my existing Skritter account will be able to be imported into ChinesePod?
Glen
Is there a way to get skitter to test traditional characters? I have my Cpod setting on traditional and have refreshed them yet Skitter still wants to test me with simplified.
I plan to buy some tool for writing characters on PC. Is Bamboo One ok with CP or does the cheaper Trust pen work also? Who has experience and can advise me on this?
2 Trackbacks
[...] are happy to announce our first partner developer today – Skritter. John Pasden has a post up on the ChinesePod blog describing what Skritter does and how the partnership will work in [...]
[...] has just announced the planned incorporation of Skritter with their service. I’d not heard of Skritter so I went [...]