A suggestion for a possible feature, somewhere down the line.

Would it be possible to have a Skritter Cross-Trainer mode for moving betwen simplified and traditional characters, or vice versa? So the way it might work is this.

Skritter gives you the simplified form, e.g.

这

You have to write the traditional form

這

Or, once again, vice versa. I imagine that this would work best by simply focusing on characters rather than on words. There would be some problems with multiple traditional forms (e.g. 麵 / 面) being represented by single simplified forms (面) and so on. But this might be handy as a relatively simple quick-and-dirty way of rapidly increasingly fluency in moving between simplified and traditional forms.

I won't be a client but I think it's a good idea!

When I'm up on 3-4000, I will definitively like to have such a feature!

That would be very effective. I can't see a quick way to implement it, so I think of this as a big feature. As there still aren't too many people going for both, it's a rather low priority.

I've added it to the feature tracker, though!

Thanks, Nick. It seems to me as if it might indeed be a big job, so I'm happy to wait as long as it takes; but good to see it added to the feature tracker.

As one going for both, I think it'd be great. Not something I would do all the time, but something that would be fun to work on after learning a set list. :)

Great idea!

Nice idea, but I don't think I'd use it. Most people who learn both are more into reading traditional and writing simplified. I'd much rather learn a few more simplified characters than spending ages learning how to write 龜...

This would interest me. In contrast to kubus's statement, I intent to write in traditional and read both. Although I don't intend to write simplified, I also know that writing a character greatly improves the speed with which I recognize it.

I would further suggest that if Skritter adopts this idea, that they also form a list of unique character simplifications to test on. The non-unique simplifications don't lose information - if one knows the generic radical simplification, then one knows how to write both versions of one character.

I'm in the same situation as Weibosi (write trad only but learning how to recognize simp just in case) but in that case we just need a small simplified characters beside the traditional one.

@Kubus : The chance that you will have to hand write 龜 in your life is extremely low ;-) If you decompose it you will see that 龜 is far to be a complex word.

@kubus, @tortue - By coincidence I just started to study 龜 a couple of weeks ago on Skritter and after the usual number of repetitions I now feel pretty confident with it. I don't have any numbers to back me up but I have a sneaking suspicion that the complexity of a character doesn't relate to how difficult it is to remember when prompted with the pinyin and definition. I remember several characters that scared me at first (e.g. 餐, 藏) but that turned out to not be anywhere near as hard as certain simple characters. (I had a great deal of trouble with 便 and 无 for some reason.)

James

P.S. I would definitely use the cross-trainer. I guess I'm in a small minority of people who are studying both simplified and traditional and want to learn to write both.

James

Maybe it's worth doing a poll related to this? That is, what combination of trad/simplified reading/writing do people aspire to mastering?

By the way, I can't help thinking that the traditional form of 龜 is amazingly cute!

Perhaps we will do a poll. At one point I looked at the number of people with "both" enabled and it's very small.

I did a study at one point (pre-Skritter) and found that complexity (as measured by number of strokes) didn't have a very significant effect on recall.