I used YellowBridge as a student way back, but the site is unusable without an ad blocker these days, and their character analysis is not reliable enough. I see zero reason to use it over other free sites like Zi.tools.

The stroke order for 國, and most other traditional characters, in Skritter is certainly correct, and I dare say the top 5,000 characters are reliable (at least). Just to clarify, you said “Character learning software such as the Skritter that you frequently recommend almost universally disappoints: it i”, but you actually meant in general and just mentioned Skritter as an example, without having checked it? We do care quite a lot about character accuracy and reliability, so if something isn’t right, we’d like to know!

http://www.yellowbridge.com/chinese/character-stroke-order.php?word=國

The result is similar to that in Pleco and Hanping Chinese Dictionary.

Stroke order for full-form characters is about as trustworthy as Chinese ‘historic’ films. 😅

I don’t think it’s my job to say what students can and cannot afford. Rather, I want to present what options there are, and I always include a range of options, including Anki, which is free on all platforms except iOS. Some people have money to invest, others do not, but I don’t see why I shouldn’t recommend paid solutions just because some people can’t afford them?

Also, could you be a bit more specific regarding traditional characters in Skritter? It’s my experience that Skritter has very good support for traditional characters compared to most other apps, considering that almost the entire team either live in Taiwan or has a study background at least partly related to Taiwan.

The main drawback is that standard Taiwanese Mandarin pronunciation is not supported very well, but that will hopefully change in the next version of the app. In what way does the app “contradict good brushwork, customary usage and the recommendations of the Taiwanese Ministry of Education”?

Since I’ve worked with this specific aspect of the app, I know that most traditional characters do follow the MoE standard. Naturally, there are thousands of characters and tens or hundreds of thousands of words, so not everything is correct, but the most commonly used language is almost certainly correct (and if it isn’t, we’d like to know)!

差不多 maybe – but who actually chooses to learn from substandard sources? 🤷‍♂️

*(Increasingly important since the introduction of the pen-brush.)

In response to Elijah’s thread (八), What if one’s end goal is not to improve writing by hand, but to boost reading comprehension/character retention? In other words, I’m wondering whether writing by hand (incl. stylus/pen/paper vs. finger tip), vs. using a non-phonetic keyboard input, which would be more effective for reading/character comprehension.

Maybe you would have the same conclusion Olle (writing by hand is better than learning new non-phon. keyboard input)?

*Unfortunate I’m not able to comment in your guy’s comment thread. I’ve noticed this every time I’ve commented. Is this an issue for others? I’m in Safari but when I tried with Chrome it’s the same. Maybe it’s a plugin/extension issue if it’s just me experiencing this.

Kindly,

This is something I’d like to dive deeper into at some point. I don’t know what it’s like to type (relatively) fast with a non-phonetic input system, but it’s conceivable that since each key is not mapped to one specific component, it might be that the link is weak enough that you can type without thinking too much of the structure. Typing in English isn’t a good comparison, maybe, but still relevant. I type fairly fast (top speed a bit above 600 CPM) and it’s not as if I think about how the words are spelt when I type, it’s all muscle memory. Obviously, I need to know how to spell on some level, because that determines the order of the letters, but at some point, it starts being a pattern of keystrokes (almost like a chord) instead of individual movements.

Anyway, the main reason I’m probably never going to invest the time necessary to learn such an input method is that there is another way that is also slow (which it would definitely be for a very long time) and is even better for reviewing how to write by hand, and that is… to write by hand. 🙂 On my phone, when writing shorter emails, messages, search strings, notes, etc.. Communicative handwriting, in other words.

I learned Cangjie a few years ago and definitely felt it helped with my reading speed & was useful to “get the pinyin out of my head”, but i ended up not doing much typing after a while. I’ve picked it up again and am typing about 30cpm. I haven’t been doing much writing by hand lately, but definitely can feel the characters flow out much smoother now when I do. It is interesting to hear that your other foreign friends typing cangjie feel they stopped thinking about the structure. Maybe that will happen if I get up to 100cpm.

I have considered doing that (learning such a method as a way to review characters more actively when typing), but it’s probably a solution that fits a very, very small number of people. I have learnt additional keyboard layouts (Dvorak) and I would hesitate to spend the massive amounts of time it takes to get good with a new layout. Most students will be much better of spending that time learning characters in some other way. 🙂

I have heard some people (non-native speakers) who learnt Cangjie that they ended up not thinking too much about structure after a while anyway, once a certain character became attached to muscle memory and the pressing of a specific combination of buttons. That seems a bit odd to me, though, it seems like if you can type it, you could slow down the process to figure out which buttons you pressed and thus the composition of the character? I mean, I don’t think how to type the words I’m typing now, but typing them certainly means that I could spell them on paper. Not exactly the same thing, but I don’t see why that wouldn’t apply. Do you have any light to shed on this?

How far are you into learning Cangjie? How’s it going?