

Ask HN: Feedback on Skritter, Learning Chinese with Spaced Repetition on App Engine - gsaines
http://www.skritter.com

======
gsaines
We founded Skritter just about 9 months ago. We got two grants to fund
development and as the front page attests, we're just three right out of
undergrad living in an apartment and developing full time.

When we were first getting started, App Engine was just becoming available,
and we thought that would be a great platform mainly because of its scalable
architecture and Python backend, which both Nick and Scott liked. We
incorporated the Spaced Repetition after we read about Supermemo in Wired
Magazine shortly after launching.

The idea is to charge users small monthly subscriptions with big discounts for
semester-signups. Since a lot of our current users are young and in school
it's really important that we keep the price affordable. We've also attended 2
trade conferences in language learning software, and will be going to one more
in about a month at which we'll be trying to sell Skritter as a site license
to institutions.

If you'd like to check it out in more detail, we've set up a demo account for
everyone on HN:

UN: hackernews pass: hackernews

Thanks a lot for your time.

~~~
patio11
_Since a lot of our current users are young and in school it's really
important that we keep the price affordable._

I remember being poor and in college once, where "poor" means I was never in
danger of starvation but I did routinely decline invitations to the movies for
want of $5.

I also remember a collection of someones (parents, university, scholarship
providers, government, self) feeling it was worth $80 per hour of instruction
to get me Japanese classes. Please do not use the "Oh noes, our customers are
poor!" factoid as a mental excuse to undercharge for your product. ($80. An.
Hour.)

I'd also like to note that a significant portion of the American collegiate
population has a significant amount of discretionary spending capability. Half
of my Japanese class had parents who were paying full freight for that $80 an
hour. Do you really _need_ to sell to the other half?

~~~
briansmith
There's so many competitors entering the market, it will be hard for anybody
to charge much more than $5. Plus, almost everybody is using the same set of
language data, so it is difficult to differentiate. There are already tons of
completely free hobbyist- and university- created tools available if you know
where to look. Plus, textbook publishers generally provide a suite of
(sometimes free) apps to complement their textbooks.

Luckily, I don't think there is any place for ad-financed products (ads are
too distracting when you are trying to memorize stuff like this), so there
won't be many free _commercial_ systems.

I am building something very similar to this. I have to say I am very
impressed with what Skritter has done so far.

~~~
patio11
_There's so many competitors entering the market, it will be hard for anybody
to charge much more than $5_

Are you acquainted with Rosetta Stone? They sell language learning software in
the "couple of hundred dollars" range. And they're pretty freaking big.

 _it is difficult to differentiate_

People always tell me that about my product. It isn't true for me, and my
product is substantially more boring and smaller in scope than learning the
key to accessing the history/culture/economic potential of China. A short list
of points to differentiate on would be who you sell to, what level of learners
you target, what focus of learners you target, visual design, etc etc.

~~~
briansmith
You were actually part of the inspiration for me getting into this market; I
even have "bingo card creator" in my notebook.

There are definitely many interesting aspects of this market. I don't think it
is _impossible_ to differentiate or I wouldn't be in it. But, I really do
think that prices for formal educational books, materials, and software are
all heading towards $0 fast.

Rosetta Stone really has executed brilliantly in its segment of the market. It
sales and marketing effort has been top-notch. It is also interesting to see
how they are attempting to cross over from do-it-yourself language learners to
traditional language learners. I would love to know what they are charging
schools for their software.

~~~
nwinter
A lot, I think. Some of the libraries we called had switched to Mango because
Rosetta Stone had become too expensive.

------
gyeh
Very nice job! One potential customer/institution to cater to: western-based
Chinese schools:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_schools>,
<http://www.ncacls.org/ncacls_frm_intro.htm>

These community based organizations often rely on eastern teaching methods
(often rote) to instruct large numbers of young children. Your app would
definitely introduce a different mindset (and fun!), when learning Chinese.

Btw, will you guys support different dialects (ie. cantonese)?

~~~
gsaines
Hey gyeh, thanks for the marketing idea. It's definitely going to be hard to
sell to institutions and every bit helps. Plus, I'm taking Chinese 1 right
now, and since the page is all in Chinese, I can practice translating what I'm
able (and letting Google translate maul the rest).

Right at the moment we don't support any other dialects due mostly to
development resource constraints, but Cantonese is on the radar. One thing I
didn't mention in my opening comment was that we are going to expand it to
Japanese in the near future, which should widen the number of people
interested.

~~~
w1ntermute
Yes, please add kanji to the system. I'm learning Japanese and use SRS's for
kanji memorization, along with Heisig's Remembering the Kanji
(<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remembering_the_Kanji>). While Anki
(<http://ichi2.net/anki/>) works wonderfully on my Gentoo system, a web-based
option would be nice as well. However, beware of lag; that was one of the big
drawbacks of Khatzumemo (<http://www.alljapaneseallthetime.com/khatzumemo/>),
which was otherwise quite well-designed, IIRC.

~~~
basugasubaku
Anki does have a web-based interface. Works great on the cell phone.

------
bdr
Bad: the logo, the blue "next" arrow", the buttons on the front page, overall
UI is busy and confusing.

Good: Everything that happens inside that beautiful white square. Stroke
recognition, hinting, etc. The demo video is also good.

~~~
gsaines
Thanks for the comments bdr. I designed the entire page, but as you may have
noticed, I've never designed a website before, all my previous design
experience has been in posters and print material. Could you elaborate on your
suggestions? For instance, we didn't spend a terribly long time coming up with
the logo, and if now that you brought it up, I'd rather like a more compact
version. Do you think eliminating the text would help?

Regarding the UI clutteri-ness, are you referring to the flash interface or
the webpage surrounding it?

~~~
bdr
Logo: I think you should keep the text. The name is non-obvious so it's
helpful to remind the user. The mascot is kind of strange. It looks like a
McDonald's character. I'm guessing you wanted something relating to "critter".
Something less literal would probably be a better match with the concept of
the site. Overall the branding is a little more casual than I would go for,
but that part's up to you. (What's up with the weird quotes at the bottom?)

UI, I'm referring to the webpage around the flash. It's a little hard for me
to tell because I'm on FF2/Linux now and the site is kind of janky, these are
some things I'd change:

\- On the homepage, the buttons don't look like buttons.

\- On the homepage, the way that the black line follows the borders of the
buttons is ugly. Maybe it's the aliasing. If you're going to have that line at
all, the horizontal should align with the vertical center of the buttons,
instead of some arbitrary point.

\- On the learning interface, the horizontal lines extending to the left of
the flash are totally arbitrary looking.

\- Too many thick black lines. Use contrast to control where the user's
attention is drawn. Right now the front page goes logo -> description ->
buttons/nav-menu (ignoring the video). Should be description -> buttons ->
nav-menu -> logo. Part of this should include making the buttons and nav menu
look more clickable.

------
pradocchia
The stroke recognition is both really cool and somewhat disorienting. Really
cool because it works, and somewhat disorienting because if you're off a bit,
it repositions the stroke.

In a fluent writer, each stroke follow from muscle memory, _relative_ to the
size and position of the previous stroke. Repositioning breaks the rhythm.

I don't know, the positive reinforcement might work very well for a beginner.
I would be more worried about the intermediate student and above.

~~~
nwinter
Really? I'd guess that it's the advanced learners who can abstract characters
better and don't need as accurate a writing style.

We're thinking of not repositioning strokes, or maybe not even recognizing
them, until each component is completed. Will improve recognition heuristics,
give less hints, and be a natural way to indicate components. We have t build
the decomposition system first, though. Might that solve the problem you
describe?

~~~
pradocchia
I was using a mouse. It would have been less jarring with a stylus. Also, I
was trying to control my hand for standard form/楷书, rather than everyday
cursive, so that didn't help either. Had I started learning with a tool like
this, my placement would be much better, just because I would have tried very
hard to minimize repositioning. Maybe. I'm still trying to think through the
implications.

You might try recognizing the strokes, but leaving them in the background in a
lighter color?

[big edit here]

Maybe resize and reposition the model character around the input character as
it is written, and then provide some sort of visual feedback at the end on the
delta? eg, good proportions, but you are 25% too small and 30% off center.

I'm trying to think of some way to a) preserve feedback while b) reinforcing
the rhythmic quality of writing. Rhythm is a mnemonic aid. If you can find
some way to reinforce it, that would be a huge boon to students.

There's a rhythm to each stroke and a composite rhythm to each character.
Combined with regular patterns like radicals and phonetic roots, rhythm is
what allows you to memorize thousands of characters. To the point that
sometimes you have to write a character to remember its stroke order.

[/edit]

Very cool site, though. I studied all through the 90s, and the pedagogy was
just awful. If I knew then what I know now about language acquisition, I could
have compressed my studies into 2 or 3 years, rather than 10. You should have
an open field.

Also: I'd love to see a system like this for 行书. The heuristics would probably
be a lot more complicated, though, and the market much smaller.

~~~
nwinter
The Wacom definitely preserves the rhythm. I dread the thought of what it
would take to do cursive instructionally. Thanks for the writing ideas. I
think there's a lot more we can do with it.

------
swombat
Looks absolutely awesome. I gave up on chinese a month ago (my chinese
girlfriend just broke up with me and I've decided to learn spanish instead),
but the tool looks immensely useful, and I was looking for a tool like this
previously (and didn't find all that much). Learning to write the characters
is integral to learning to read them (stroke order is very important).

The video is excellent... I just sat there and stared at it. Only criticism
is, being able to draw the characters on-screen does not automatically
translate to being able to write them by hand. Do you have a way to translate
the on-screen writing skill to manual writing skill? If not, I would suggest
this simple method: provide a way for the user to select characters that
he/she has already learned on-screen and print out a practice sheet (A4 or
Letter sized, probably as a PDF), filled with measured squares (with the
guidelines), with the first square containing the character, the next 10
containing a pale grey version of the character, and all the other squares
blank.

In my experience I needed to fill most of an A4 page before being able to
write the character freehand without guidelines - perhaps even more than that.
If you have this feature, then next time I'm learning chinese (!) I'll gladly
pay an "affordable monthly subscription" (like, about $5-10) to use your tool,
probably for about a year (I'd probably buy a year in advance).

Oh, as someone pointed out, you'll lose all the students with that
subscription... perhaps worth offering a student subscription for a little
less (or even contacting universities to subsidise their student
memberships?).

Good luck!

~~~
nwinter
Thanks, swombat. I guess printable drill sheets will go on the feature list,
but they sound pretty low priority.

You're right that writing in the screen only isn't going to do anyone's
handwriting any prettiness, but so far it looks like knowing how to write each
character transfers from one to the other. Perhaps calligraphic style can be
learned by interested students on their own?

~~~
girk
Just so you know, the feature of having printable drill sheets should most
definitely NOT be low priority. It might very well be your magic key to
getting institutions on board. My Chinese professors from the past have been
pining over such a feature, and continually ask me for resources that would
meet this need. Again, drop me an email at melgirk at mail by Google.

Just as a bit of background, I am fluent in Chinese, have a degree in Chinese,
and a few years ago, published a set of Chinese flashcards that are being sold
in China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Australia, Japan, the US, and soon, Europe. I
have a lot of relevant experience and knowledge to contribute.

------
simc
I'm a serious student of Chinese. Would I pay for this? Maybe if it was cheap,
but probably not. The stroke order thing is useful, and that is the only
reason i'd use it. It just revealed to me the while I was writing the strokes
for 我 in the right order I was writing the first stroke the wrong way, which
was interesting I guess. However, your stroke order for 好 seems wrong (the
woman radical upward vertical stroke, should come before the horizontal,
according to Learning Chinese Characters Volume 1).

However now I'm not a absolute beginner any more so I have a reasonably good
intuition about stroke order, but if I write them in the wrong order I guess I
don't really care very much.There are already many good spaced repetition
programs like Anki, which are free. I've implemented my own system based of
Leitner flashcards for the Nintendo DS (I haven't released it), which is what
I use.

~~~
nwinter
We allow any stroke order for 女 because a lot of people write it non-
standardly in order to make it look better.

Skritter's deal is to make spaced repetition easy (premade textbook lists, no
need to grade yourself) and efficient (taking advantage of domain-specific
knowledge), while building writing practice into it. Certainly if you're
making your own SRS, you probably don't need the ease of use. Your Nintendo DS
app sounds cool--are you planning on releasing it, or is it a personal
project?

~~~
simc
I am planning to put it up, but it is basically does what I want it to now so
I am not going to put a lot effort into it to go the extra mile for consumer
grade usability. You have to create a pcx file for every question/answer card,
which makes it a bit difficult to use if you can't program a script to render
them from a csv file. I was thinking of putting the program up with a couple
of premade decks like remembering the kanji and perhaps some other textbooks.

------
jbrun
That is amazing, I spent a year in China and the characters were so hard. I
would have to try this over a long time to see if it is better than hand
drawings, but it seems pretty good.

How do you deal with radicals and learning related characters?

~~~
nwinter
Character decompositions while practicing are planned, so when you write each
radical or component it'll identify it and give you info on how the character
is constructed. That'll take a while, though. We have a radical vocab list,
but it's not that great.

We don't have a way of linking related characters together. Haven't thought of
any good ideas for it, yet.

~~~
devin
I would consider linking characters by various criteria (the sound, the
radicals, the meaning). In Chinese my experience has been that understanding
the relationship between characters is not a science. What I mean is, I don't
really care if you are giving me the perfect ancient etymology of a word or
character so long as I am able to explore and relate characters in a way that
makes sense to _me_.

~~~
gsaines
Yeah, definitely devin. What we'd like to do is create both a character
decomposition system and a mnemonics system that would be seeded across users
so that people can get the stories (and hopefully by association) the
character lodged in memory. A lot of Chinese-English dictionaries have exactly
this sort of organization.

------
smoody
Nicely done! Google should use it as a showcase app -- It's definitely the
most 'grown-up' App-Engine-based site I've seen.

As an aside, how did you accomplish those great perspective transformations in
your front-page screencast?

~~~
gsaines
Thanks for taking a look at it smoody. We were actually waiting for some of
the new features to come online before we submitted ourselves to the App
Engine showcase, but that's definitely happening soon now that everything is
put together.

To answer your question about the demo video, I used Adobe After Effects and
3D layer manipulations of video captured in Growler Guncam to create the video
effects. We used Guncam, which is a pretty out of date capture program mostly
intended for capturing in game footage, because it has the highest capture fps
unlike camtasia and its ilk. The problem with Guncam is that it's really
resource intensive at 24fps, so we were really restricted in how much of the
screen we could capture. And just for total disclosure, I figured a lot of
this out myself, but the web developer for fontstruct, who I contacted when
building our demo video, was very helpful in guiding me to the right methods
and I owe him one. He definitely deserves a shout out.

------
rms
The relevant Wired article:
[http://www.wired.com/medtech/health/magazine/16-05/ff_woznia...](http://www.wired.com/medtech/health/magazine/16-05/ff_wozniak?currentPage=all)

------
Tacomanator
I'm glad you're planning on expanding the site to include Japanese, I'm very
very excited about this. I was not able to login using the demo account given,
did you already expire it?

~~~
gsaines
Hey Tacomantor, sorry to hear about the problem with the demo account. I'll
talk to Scott and Nick and see what can be done about that.

 _Edit_ They are currently asleep. I will let them know in the morning
however. Thanks for the tip off.

~~~
nwinter
Someone changed the password, I guess. I changed it back.

~~~
Tacomanator
Cool thanks, I was able to get in and check it out. I thought I saw somewhere
before that it has a setting for stroke order strictness, but I could not find
it documented anywhere. Overall I think the UI needs a little work still but
very glad to see this concept in execution. I await the release of Japanese..

~~~
girk
I actually found with several of the characters that the stroke order it
dictated was not correct. Meaning that if I tried to write it in the correct
order, it wouldn't keep my strokes, because it had a different order in mind.

------
est
I am a Chinese, I'll say this app is awesome, esp with the animated Flash for
stroke orders. You must have quite a large database & clever algorithm to do
so.

The only website I know that could lookup Chinese characters based on strokes
drawing on screen is <http://www.nciku.com/>

About GAE & GFW, I strongly suggest skritter to support httpS protocol fully

~~~
pradocchia
the handwriting recognition at nciku.com is pretty cool. it had no problem
with cursive forms or joined strokes. thanks for the link!

------
dantheman
I just signed up, but once i get to my home page I click practice & it doesn't
allow me to start.

I'd like to learn a simple character as soon as I've signed up.

~~~
nwinter
Ah. I think we'll improve the post-signup flow to land you on the vocab lists
page.

------
rgrieselhuber
Very nice. If you could incorporate a Japanese version, it would be great.

------
jwt
Wow, very impressive stuff. A job well executed and done. Keep it up!

------
jpwagner
so easy to try it now: i love it!

------
si2
What a cool application. I would love to be able to use it without paying when
you do launch. I find that learning Chinese on there becomes enticing, and
there is a certain feeling that I am playing a game. I don't think it would
hurt to have a ten character demo on the front page with a full tutorial for
the Chinese and computer illiterate. That may hook inidividual users,
especially if you can buy in at a good rate for starter packages. It seems
like you guys are trying to exclusively appeal to the very intent on learning
Chinese people, but even from your testimonials it seems that Skritter is a
good pass time, even for those not studying Chinese and just want an easy, fun
way of drawing chinese letters. I think offering a startup package for cheap
will draw a lot of people, and as I have found out, you will soon get hooked.

Also, it may be sweet to add little quiz games to Skritter. Like timed
strokes, or something fun (you appear to be creative) to really entice people
and motivate them to move on to the next lesson. It always feels better to
conquer something like that in an online learning app... And finally, please
tell you guys are planning an iPhone app?

~~~
nwinter
Those are good ideas. I guess we have been targeting focused learners. I'm not
sure how much we could offer for free, though, without diluting it for paying
users. What do you think?

An iPhone app will be awesome, but we're pretty bottlenecked on developing
power, so it'll have to be a while. Too bad!

