Skritter Public Beta for Android & Free 3-Week Trial

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If you are learning Japanese and/or Mandarin Chinese and have an Android device, I highly recommend checking out Skritter’s new public beta app. As I mention in my review of Skritter, they offer one of the best tools for learning Chinese characters. Instead of traditional flashcards that just test passive recognition, the Skritter site and apps require that you actually write out the characters on the screen or using your mouse/trackpad. This “active recall” approach is far more effective than the self-gradings used in other spaced repetition apps. And best of all, in cases when you have no idea how to write a character, Skritter provides nifty stroke by stroke hints to help you along. If you haven’t tried Skritter yet, now would be a good time as you can get a 3-week trial instead of the 1 week they usually offer. The offer is valid for new accounts activated before August 31, 2014.

5 Psychological Obstacles Standing Between You and Fluency

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I spend lots of my time learning and writing about psychology. Most of my favorite language bloggers do the same. But why? Isn’t all this psychology stuff just a bunch of touchy-feely mumbo jumbo? Isn’t the only important thing in language learning how much you study? Time on task is indeed paramount to success, but the quantity of learning (although important) matters far less than the quality. And what determines the impact of your language learning time? Your psychology. Read on to see the five most insidious obstacles standing between you and fluency.

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