So we all know why we're using Skritter, but I'm curious as to where we're all coming from and how Chinese fits into our lives.

I'll start. I'm Chloe and I'm a senior at Wellesley College studying Media Arts & Sciences and Psychology. I want to go to grad school for Human-Computer Interaction. I'm native Shanghainese but left China when I was 5 and now I'm getting back in touch with my culture by taking Chinese in college. I think it would be nice to live in Shanghai for at least few months at some point in the future.

I started taking Chinese on a whim -- I don't even remember why, I had no connection to Chinese whatsoever. All I remember is getting halfway through first semester and thinking, "Nnngh, this is so hard! But I can't quit now, or all that work will have been wasted!" I recognized not its all-consuming nature. I still haven't had the opportunity to study Chinese in China, which all of my then-classmates have done. I'll be proud if I can advance now that I'm on my own with no class, no teacher, no immersion -- just a whole lot of Internet. That's the plan, anyway. You'll all get to see how I do when I try to translate Skritter into Chinese in several months.

My name is Nathan and I teach Chinese at a high school in New York City. I'm always looking for new online resources for studying Chinese. My kids and I are very impressed with Skitter!

I'm a student in international relations, in Australia (Griffith University). I was brought up in France and decided when I was 18 that I had enough of Europe, and left for China without speaking a word of mandarin. I spent a year and a half over there before going to Oz, so now my kouyu is pretty good, but my writing sucks. I'm going back to Beijing in July. After 10 months without Chinese I'm getting back into it and realize how fast you forget...

I am in my last semester of my post graduate in business psychology.
Before my studies I went to China for half a year to Chinese because I couldn't find a job here in Switzerland (many of you probably know that in China anyone who has a decent level of English can go and teach there and lead a rather comfortable life...12 hours of teaching and more than enough money to eat out all the time).
That where I met my wife who is, of course, Chinese. Although we are living in Switzerland I am doing my best to improve my Chinese in my spare time.
My oral Chinese is now at a level where I can more or less communicate with my in-laws (unless my father-in-law tries to explain philosophical aspects of hong lou meng :), but my knowledge of writing Chinese is, well, not so impressive.
Sometime in the future we might well move back to China and until then I have to make sure my Chinese still improves a bit...so I have to : day day study up :)

Hi, my name is Bo and I'm a sinoholic. Seven years ago I met a cute girl at university in Tokyo. "Great", I thought, "now I'll really get good at Japanese"... Turns out she was Chinese. Oops. Seven years later that cute girl and I are married, living in New York. I started studying Chinese so I could impress her. I got serious about it so I could talk with her family. I continued so we could raise our (future) kids to be bilingual. Now studying Chinese is just part of my life. It's what I do. I love it.

I have always been very interested in languages on a hobby level. I once studied Esperanto and on and off I've also studied Turkish. In 2001, my brother studied for a year in Beijing after a couple of years studies here in Sweden. I visited him and I really liked China eventhough the language didn't really catch my interest then. It just looked so time consuming.

Last year, however ~100 days before the olympic games, a friend and I decided to learn 1 character per day until 080808. It went well, and after that I really got hooked. I have no chinese connection whatsoever, other the fact that I have had an three year old plan to visit Beijing in the end of July 2009. Until then my goal is to reach 1000 characters. In parallel, on a daily basis, I use chinesepod.com for audio, jMemorize for reading training, a couple of real books for lessons and grammar, plecodict for dictionary and basic flashcards.

I'm Ben, I'm from the UK and I'm a physicist. After graduating I went to Chengdu to teach English, and took up learning Chinese around the same time. That was about eight years ago. Since then, I've mostly been back in the UK, though I did spend a couple of years in Singapore.

I think that since I've started to learn Chinese, and have made reasonable progress, I don't want to stop! I would say my spoken Chinese is intermediate. I had a bit of a wake-up call a while back regarding my reading comprehension though, after taking a placement test for a class. I used to feel quite pleased with myself for being able to read a few hundred characters - after the test I just felt illiterate! That convinced me to start putting more hours in...

I'm Bryce Hathaway. I do challenging things, and Chinese seems like the most challenging language in the world to learn. I've subscribed to Chinese pod, and if you work in Silicon Valley you might see me blabbing in Chinese while listening to podcasts in my '90 Civic Wagon on highway 680. It's surprising how many Chinese people work for NVIDIA, so hopefully as my speaking improves I'll have plenty of opportunities to practice.
So far, I'd say this is THE best writing practice software I've ever seen.

Such fascinating users, all! Makes me want to get to those other community features and add user profile pages and everything, so I can learn yet more about you sirs and ladies.

I'm Zach,
I spent a year in China in 2007. First semester at BLCU and then travelling around/adventuring.
Currently second year uni studying commerce.
Since I've been back I've been learning more chinese than I learnt in China!

I'm Steven, born and raised in Belgium. I one day decided working life was not for me, quit and started travelling. Before China i wasn't really intrested in the country, however I made good friends, fell in love with the country so much that after leaving to travel more, I came backvery soon. I then had the unexpected opportunity to become a partner of a bar live my life here.

After living for two years in China my chinese didn't progress fast enough because of lack of discipline and being in a environment where all the Chinese want to speak english. I started to go to learn in uni, with a lot of frustration since i never learned to read or write so had to start on a level that's below my ability. So here I am getting my written level up up up so I can finally study some hardcore Chinese haha.

I'm Gary and I'm a pirate communist gnome. I'm from from north of China, pretty much Russia, actually, and now I live in George's closet plotting how to take over the world. I'm using Skritter because knowing the #1 language in the world will give me a pretty high advantage in the field of espionage. I want to be the bad guy you see in those James Bond movies, except I am not weak and can't die. Hey, what's the fastest and quickest way to China? Anyone know of any secret tunnels?

ps.
Love Marx or Mao? Let's talk.

Gary, how are you posting on our forums? You are still in George's closet. You haven't turned our refrigerator to "icy blast" again, have you?

That's why my pasta was frozen... oh man, we got Gary'd.