I'm curious to know if I'm the only one using Skritter to embiggen my skills in both Chinese and Japanese? Chime in if you do too, and please share your study habits, successes, and failures.

I'd like to study Japanese eventually. I'm curious, how has this been working out for you? What level were you at in each language when you started?

I'm studying both simplified and traditional Chinese and it's definitely very slow compared to studying only one, but there are lots of patterns that get repeated over and over.

James

First, embiggen is an awesome word and I hope it catches on. Second, to not answer your question in another way, I've only tried out the functionality of the Japanese version but I found when I was in Japan last week that my Chinese knowledge was very helpful (I could read many a character on signs and get the general idea of a lot of things).

I'd be interested in seeing the study habits of others and how they keep the languages separate in their heads (when I try to dig up my limited French, I get one or two French words out and then seem to automatically switch to Chinese).

I don't know how many will respond, but I do know there are several people doing both on Skritter. Intense!

I second Doug's comments about French vs Chinese. The first time I visited Taiwan, I instinctively wanted to speak French to everyone. Now that I've learned a bunch of Chinese, it's a disaster when I go to Quebec....

Hi,

I am currently using a Heisig approach to study Simplified and Traditional characters with 1 pinyin reading and avoid studying words. It is working quite well for me with 20 minutes per day. I have found I get bogged down if I try to achieve too many different things with Skritter at the same time.

I would like to adopt a similar approach for Japanese characters picking one OnYomi reading. I actually tried this but quickly got bogged down. One problem is that the Heisig keywords are slightly different and conflict with the Chinese ones. For the most part though, they are the same, and correspond to the Japanese variant of the same base form. Does anyone know? I was planning on evaluating it myself and coming up with a list of conflicts.

I hope to jump start my Japanese study with some lists of characters that are extremely similar in reading and in relatively common usage.

Is anyone else thinking along these lines?

I don't know about the rest of it, but I can send you a list of characters with their RTH and RTK keywords together if you want to look for differences, if you want.

What I have is a list of RTH keywords + characters and a list of RTK keywords + characters. It is easy to find them from the web. There are several ways of linking Chinese and Japanese Characters using Unihan from the unicode website. That is an amazing resource.

I was planning of playing with these linkages a bit to see how big the problem is. I did this about 10 years ago and it didn't seem to bad but I have misplaced the files.

The main resource I use for Japanese stuff is Jim Breen's amazing website.

What might be useful from Skritter is some way of cross-linking the Chinese and Japanese but I don't even know what would be useful beyond exporting Chinese characters, converting a Chinese list to a Japanese list, and importing the Japanese list as vocabulary. Something akin to the current Simplified / Tradition would be nice but I can understand how hard that would be.

I messed around with Heisig when I was first trying to learn Japanese, but didn't find it very comfortable to use. I know Heisig is one of those things people get polarized about, so I'll just leave it at "didn't work for me."

As far as my Skrittering habits, I try to hit Chinese (both simplified and traditional) for about 30 min/day, and Japanese about 20 min/day. I found those numbers to be about right for reviewing old or fresh items, and picking up "a couple-three" more each day. Sorry for the Southernism, there... been in Arkansas too long.

I've been hard at Japanese for almost 2 years now, but I only started Mandarin after discovering Skritter a couple months ago. I don't seem to have a problem separating them in my head, and I can't explain why.

Actually, I think Chinese is a little easier to read than Japanese so far. If you know the characters, Chinese grammar seems closer to English and therefore more intuitive. Everything in Japanese is backwards and upside-down comparatively, and after two years I still struggle somewhat.

I have zero Chinese speaking practice, but after I muster enough knowledge and courage, I'm going to tell my Chinese co-worker what I'm doing and hope she'll help me with that.

Thanks for contributing!

ntozubod, I've sent you a fatty file with some eccentricities and some gold in it.

jcdoss: you should hit your Chinese co-worker with the ol' 你好! No need to wait around, eh? 加油！

@jcdoss People actually say "couple-three" here in New York State, although only in the rural upstate areas.

You should definitely talk with your coworker. In my experience, Chinese people are always very receptive to people who are studying Chinese. (OK, they will often tell you that you speak very well even when you know you sound horrible, but that's another issue.)

The sooner you start speaking, the better. My father has been studying Spanish from books for about 40 years. He only started speaking it a little more than a year ago when I married a Latina, and the books haven't helped him much. ;) To learn to speak, you need to speak.

James