Hi All,

So I just started a couple of days ago. And I'm having lots of fun with the website, however I can only seem practice definitions and reading.

For one I don't know how to read Japanese at all so the reading sections seems completely useless to me right now. Should I learn some basics on my own and come back to Skritter... is that the idea?

And more importantly I can't practice the writing. The first day I was able to do a couple. But now I only get "Nile River" as a writing prompt, and then when I hit next, it just says "looking for one more word" forever.
Anyone else experiencing this problem? Any help would be much appreciated.

Thanks

Actually I think I fixed the issue. I believe I was using the wrong study list. I was trying to write stuff form Adventures in Japanese but it seems like I should have been using "rembering Kanji".

Any input about the reading question and general how-to-s would still be appreciated.

Most textbooks delay the kanji writing for many of the words, so you start off without many writing prompts. Here's some more info:

http://www.skritter.com/faq#why_no_kanji

I'm a Chinese user, but the principles should be the same.

If you do not want to use the reading function, you can turn it off. If you go to your study settings from the 'Account' menu, you can turn on or off the four study functions so you could just leave writing active if that is what you want to do.

Personally, I don't use reading, but you can easily turn it on and off as your learning progresses or your study needs change.

Thanks Nick, I just changed my settings. I'm also pretty set with doing the Kanji from the Heisig, remembering kanji book.

Thanks for your response HappyBlue. I have turned the reading function off. But I was wondering if I should be using it to learn basic Japanese reading, or if I need to do some background learning on my own, before this reading function is more useful?

My recommendation as far as reading is to first master hiragana if you haven't already. There's a ton of sites out there that teach the kana; Tae Kim's guide does a real nice job of it with videos if you need help with pronunciation or whatnot:

http://www.guidetojapanese.org/learn/complete/writing

Print yourself out some practice grids and trace/draw the characters a bunch of times until you are familiar with their shape and pronunciation (Skritter doesn't teach the kana yet ). A good way to practice is to find sentences in hiragana from children's stories and copy them character by character on a grid or other scratch paper.

When you feel like you've got a good grip on hiragana (don't worry about katakana right now), find some super easy hiragana only children's stories. Here is an awesome website that has hundreds of the most beginner-level stories, with an option to have it actually read the story to you as well which is pretty cool:

http://www.hukumusume.com/douwa/0_6/0nen.html

That link is for the nursery school/kindergarten level stories, but you can see the links for the １ねんせい　through ６ねんせい stories are right there under them. The greatest part about this site is that the words in the stories have spaces between them (for the most part), which is incredibly useful since even native adult Japanese have some difficulty reading unspaced streams of nothing but hiragana words.

As far as reading the kanji in the reading prompts, you just have to learn each one as Skritter adds it from your list, but you really gotta be able to read the equivalent hiragana answer for it to be of much use. Like HappyBlue said, you can turn off the studying of reading in Skritter's options until you have worked on your hiragana some, then switch it back on.

Also, I almost forgot to mention that www.renshuu.org has some great quizzes for onyomi/kunyomi readings of kanji, grammar, and a bunch of other stuff, so you might want to check that out, too.

Thanks so much valymer. I'm checking out all these great sites.

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Skritter has the Heisig lists for Traditional and Simplified Hanzi - Book 1, but they don't seem to have the Heisig Books for Kanji.

See below.

Skritter has Remembering the Kanji lists. You have to be set to Japanese to see them--could that be it?

We also have the Heisig keywords available as an option no matter what language or list you're studying--it's in your study settings.

I was mistaken, Nick. I looked at the list itself where the keywords didn't appear, but when I went into Study the keywords were there.