Long time reader, first time poster. Great job on the site gentlemen, please keep up the good work.


I realize that the homophones in the language make a 听写 test difficult. My issue is, a 听写 is now what I need most. I can read magazines and newspapers, but I get lost in meetings. And when watching movies I desperately rely on the sbutitles.

I've resorted to listening to some books with audio tracks, pausing in the sentence every five or six words, and then writing out the part of the sentence. What I'm getting at is that I'm starting to come back to skritter less frequently because I feel i'm getting more traction writing out full sentences in a 听写 format.

I realize you guys have a lot on your plate, and people with this issue are probably the smallest portion of your customers, so I wouldn't be rushing to tackle this if I were you.

None the less, as my relationship with the skritter world starts to part, i just wanted to have a clean break up.

All the best,
Pat

Are you just in it for a test?

For me, having an active conversation with real people for 5-10 hours a week was several times as productive as sitting in classes for 15-20 hours a week.

The answer to listening is conversation. Make sure to get your conversation partner to correct you if you're working on speaking improvements, by the way.

@Thomas I agree 100%, conversation is by far the most effective. Although I see @epatmaloney's point. There's no reason in principle why the Skritter guys couldn't add a dictation mode if they were to so desire. I would think it would only be useful with phrases of at least two characters, though, due to the huge number of homophones.

A variant would be to do pinyin dictation, so homophones wouldn't be an issue. I use Anki for this and it works great.

James

I don't know how many other skritter users have the same issue, but my situation is quite similar to epatmaloney (I'm probably a bit less advanced, but my listening comprephension is horrible while my reading is pretty good.)

I've started to listen to as much Chinese as possible, but I haven't done that long enough to see much improvement.

I can suggest two things: just listen to stacks of radio programs, TV shows (my favourite: http://www.ntdtv.com/xtr/gb/prog109.html - absolutely hilarious and you learn a bunch) and so forth.

Secondly, assuming you're outside China, just find some Chinese online to teach you. You can pay them what you can afford, in the range of 40-80 RMB, and just speak for an hour on Skype or other VOIP software. How to find these Chinese people? Find an online forum and make a post in Chinese stating your conditions, giving your contact information, and then just arrange it with individual people. Use paypal. I do this several times a week, and just pick out news topics from the Western press (and human rights in China--always good to tell them what the heck their insane government is doing to their own people) and babble away for an hour. They correct usage and ask questions. It is a simple and effective formula. I don't get to see my real-life Chinese friends enough, and they have more interesting things to say than me, so I use this to supplement. It is a focused time. A normal conversation may be 20/80, but this is 95/5, or something.

If you listen to stacks of Chinese and do this conversation approach several times a week, you'll be right as rain after a couple of years. The fellow above says he fits in 5-10 hours a week. If you can do that you'll be set. MPR

Can you share some details of how you image the ideal 听写 mode on Skritter would work?

well, the way I imagine it it would only work for words with soundfiles obviously and probably only with at least to syllables.
Skritter would play the sound file and we would be supposed to write the character. As hints we could take a look at the example sentence and there could be a button to check the meaning as a hint.

by the way, I tried some thing similiar a couple month ago with skritter to prepare for a vocabulary dictation. I crammed the lesson we were supposed to know (after already having learned them normally) and resized the window in a way that I could not see the meaning displayed but just press "a" to hear the sound clip.
I thought the mode was working good, I even considered doing this as part of my normal skrittering sessions, but I didn't like the fact that it would interfere with my normal skritter srs.

Because of all the homophones I think it is crucial to have a context. So instead of writing only single words, you should better write whole sentences and even better whole texts. But I don't think that 听写 needs to be part of Skritter. The goal of Skritter is to teach you how to write and read the characters. For talking and listening comprehension there are so many other resources and methods. For learning a language you should always use a mix of resources and methods, not rely on one.

For 听写 you could try out Slow Chinese: http://www.slow-chinese.com/

But honestly I don't think that 听写 is the best way to go for improving your listening comprehension and speech skills. You don't need to understand every single word (and also not need to be able to write every single word) to understand a conversation. Trying to understand everything may even hinder you from improving your listening comprehension, because unless you are very advanced there always will be words that you haven't studied before. You should first focus on catching the keywords and understanding the general meaning of a conversation/podcast/broadcast/movie etc. And definitely switch off the subtitles when you watch a movie on DVD.

I've been there too. When I first came to China, I could read and write Chinese but not say a single sentence, not to speak of understanding something that was said to me. At first I always had a paper with me to have written conversations with other people. And when someone was talking to me I had some inner subtitles in my head. If I could not connect a word with a character, I could simply not understand it at all. Only practice makes perfect. So I agree with other posters: listen to as much material as possible and talk to Chinese people as much as possible. That will help you much more than 听写.

Sweet Bejevus, 8 replies, I believe that's the skritter equivalent of a reddit front page. (nerd-gasm)

To all; you're right conversation is key, I've just been reluctant to accept that. I view most of my tutors as 'leased friends', I've developed a handful of legit mainland friends here in Shanghai but I'm still trying to wrap my mind around being on the social charity end of a relationship. Similar to when I hot babe is interested in me, my first reaction is "Ok, what's the catch? This doesn't add up". I'll get past this, just as the Greeks said, wisdom comes through suffering.

@ Meihui,slow-chinese -hotdamn, I love this site. At first I thought I was too cool and discarded it, but it's actually very useful. I'm going to give this guy my first born son. thank you, I'll PM you about inquires for other resources.

@MPR thanks as well. I'm SH, but it might as well be singapore or HK considering the divide between my life and Chinese people my age (late 20's scraping every dime to save for a house type scenario). I always felt BJ was so much better from an integration perspective.

@Nick I'm clearly no expert but here's my two cents: I think the crux of the issue might be IP. If you could freely use alot of the MP3 tracks that come with text books, they could be easy to chop up into segments which you could possibly feed into system. I'm guessing access to a library of audio files would be the main hurdle. Outside of recording your own content you could use a speech program, but since we're developing speaking habits, I would avoid that for fear of speaking like Steven Hawken. (no disrepect he's a great man)Perhaps you could leverage your relationship with Chinesepod. That's really all that comes to mind. At it's basic, I would just like paragraphs that I could write out in large chunks, coupled with the function of doing it from audio cues. (short stories, essays, news reports etc) I'm guessing you've already thought of what I've mentioned but I still wanted to give what I could. On a separate note, I would be very interested in hearing about your company'ss growth, next round of financing etc. I realize it's not the focus of this forum, and none of our business, but I think you guys have a great product in a quickly growing market. Using your repetition algorithm and linking up with universities is genius and should help differentiate yourselves from Pleco's offerings. Once again, keep up the good work, I'm big fan of what you guys have done & are doing.

cheers
Pat

Thanks for the suggestions on the 听写. I don't think it's something we're looking to add any time soon. Perhaps Skritterers can report their experiences using other tools or pen and paper to do similar exercises, and tips for integrating the results of that practice back into Skritter.

Pat, what do you think of the current text-to-speech solution we're trying on the example sentences? Is it useful for learning, too computerish, or are these example sentences themselves not relevant enough to be able to tell?

Sorry, we keep our sensitive company info private. I will say that we're growing well, and the market is growing, and business is good. Thanks for the kind words!

ChinesePod has a 听写 mode. Each lesson has an "Exercises" page. You click on a sound file and hear a sentence. Then you write it in a space.

I'm not sure how it would work in Skritter because of all the homophones. You would need to hear the character in the sample sentence. Which would be far too complicated. In the end, I think that function would actually be a distraction from Skritter's core goal: learning to write characters.

curious: how many skritterers are there in this world?