Inkren’s Skritter.com launches Japanese version of its character learning system

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Ohio-based software start-up company Inkren has launched Skritter.com’s Japanese version. The Skritter.com service, already used thousands of hours per month by students learning Chinese characters, can now help those learning the intricate characters of Asia’s two largest economies, Chinese and Japanese.

Skritter.com started after Nick Winter got the idea that learning Chinese characters should be more like a video game. After some research confirmed that students of Chinese typically retain only 39% of the characters they learn after three semesters of study, he persuaded two friends to start Inkren and bring the venture to life.

Japanese characters (kanji) are a logical extension for Skritter.com as the character sets for both languages came from the same original set of ancient Chinese characters. Says Winter: “Japanese learning technology is way ahead of Chinese, but those 2000 daily-use kanji are still titans looming on the path to fluency. We want to topple them.”

Skritter.com uses computer algorithms to decide when a learner has drawn a character properly (using a mouse, touchpad, or computer tablet) giving instant feedback. The site also tracks which characters a user has gotten correct giving progress reports and feeding the user reviews spaced for proper learning.

The purpose of Skritter.com, says co-founder Scott Erickson, is “to take the hardest part of learning Chinese and Japanese, the reading and writing of characters, and make it as efficient, effective and engaging as possible.”

Inkren has signed deals with several universities allowing their students unlimited use of the technology. Learners spent 20,764 hours learning 484,260 Chinese characters in 2009 using Skritter and are on course to greatly exceed these numbers in 2010. Building support for Japanese characters has been a major development project and the development team is excited to give students the world over a tool that can help them make it easier to learn Japanese characters and discover the richness of the Japanese language.

The Japanese learning service has been in testing for several months working out all of the bugs and making sure that lists of characters from the most popular Japanese textbooks are included at launch. Beta users have provided significant feedback helping to squish bugs and improve features to make the service ready for launch.