Feedback on Skritter, Learning Chinese with Spaced Repetition on App Engine
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!