Well, different people care about different things, so I will keep commenting on how traditional characters are handled, but not likely at the top. Some kind of short summary, maybe, so you can see pros and cons at a glance?

When it comes to supporting traditional characters, I think few people realise how much work it involves. Many people (not you in this case) seem to think that it’s just a matter of flipping a switch or something.

When it comes to Skritter, I can certainly understand if you think that it doesn’t do a good enough job (it’s far from perfect, like I say in my review as well), but we have spent literally hundreds and hundreds of hours on support for traditional characters. That’s expensive, so most companies don’t really bother. I’m not saying that this makes it okay to not care about traditional characters, just that we’re talking about serious amounts of time and money invested to make it work well.

As someone who focuses on traditional characters (along with simplified, but traditional is still what I prefer and what I would choose myself), I try to evaluate how good or bad it is in the apps I review. Simply saying that “it’s not great” doesn’t help, because that would be true almost every service. I know of hardly any learning app that can deal with simplified and traditional characters really well (if you do know of such apps, please let me know). This is regrettable, but understandable.

There’s a big difference between machine conversion all the way and what Skritter does, though, just want to point that out!

The notion that you can depend on automatisation from simplified characters or, for that matter, on non-users of full-form characters (many of whom are also ignorant of other Chinese languages – itself an obstacle to understanding) when these are your preference is the reason why I’ve rejected such outlets as FluentU, so-called dual-character dictionaries and Skritter. It just isn’t worth my while fixing other people’s errors, even if I do notice them. Frankly, I’d prefer a warning at the top of your reviews, Olle: NOT FOR TRADITIONAL CHARACTERS or something similar. (I know that you use both, but hey – we’re not all intending to teach this language.) That way, I’d save myself the frustration if having a cutting-edge tool recommended, only to find it’s only available to me with a wooden instead of a steel blade.

Thank you for sharing! I’m actually looking into updating this article and it’s somewhat dismaying that it’s still not possible to export vocabulary. I’ve always had a problem with apps that try to do too much, or that are very good at one thing, but then insist of doing other things in-house even if it’s not up to par. I have’t tried FluentU for a while, so I’m not saying they’re guilty of this now, but it was the case last time I checked.

For completeness for anyone else who finds this post like I did, try the Chrome extension Data Miner Pro. With some fiddling about it will let you download your current lists.

How did you scrape you vocab off? I need to do this and I can’t figure it out.
I hate their revision implementation. It is both slow (I live in China, so it has to be at the mercy of my VPN as well as being slow generally), many of the revision sentences they present the words in are full of words I have never encountered, and the timing is overwhelming. I want to migrate my list to Anki or Pleco.

They seem to have doubled the price compared to when I wrote the review! I think there are still monthly options, though. I agree that $15/month for just the basic plan and $30/month for the plus plan is definitely expensive. Do you know if it’s just a price increase or if there’s new content as well?

I was able to scrape my vocabulary off the website into a google spreadsheet and import that into Anki, so problem solved.

There are other issues, such as “mastering” a video takes countless repetitions of the flashcards, which is absurd. I made a macro to repeatedly run through the learning section for an advanced video I felt comfortable with, marking everything as “already known”. It took dozens upon dozens of learning sessions. Holy crap.

Supposedly, the upside of marking things as “already known” is it helps your video recommendations, as the little blue bar underneath will show you how much of the video you know and how much you don’t. However, as far as I can tell, the algorithm used by FluentU sucks for SRS. Then again, the algorithm may view “mastering” a video in one day unfavorably, but if I’m a native speaker, it shouldn’t take so much effort to tell FluentU what I know.

Room for improvement while watching videos:
1. Left-click: “Mark as known”
2. Right-click: “Mark as unknown”
3. Double right-click: “Bring up more information about the word.”
4. Option to set entire sentences as known automatically.
5. Shortcut to set current sentence to known.

The biggest issue for me is the google plugin they use for typing Chinese. As Mason Wev says it doesn’t support traditional characters very well. As I’m learning traditional characters, I try to limit my exposure to simplified characters as much as possible, and Fluentu does make this a bit hard when it requires me to type simplified Chinese when reviewing vocabulary. I believe this is because they’re using a Google plugin for typing characters, so I don’t expect much improvement here anytime soon.