I get the feeling that the majority Skritter userbase is using it to learn Chinese. This would makes sense given that it was born as Chinese-only, but as far as I can tell Japanese has been an option for about a year and a half now and I was curious what percentage of the userbase is studying each language. Would any of the Skritter guys be willing to share this info?

Yeah, it's definitely rare to see posts that are related to Japanese/Japan. I would be interested in seeing the percentage breakdown as well.

I think most Japanese learners only learn speaking, listening, Hiragana,Katakana, and Romaji. I haven't seen many Japanese learners who study Kanji, aside from native Chinese speakers. It's probably because Hiragana and Katakana cover a lot of what's written, and Kanji often has Romaji underneath it in public places, so it's probably not nearly as important for a Japanese learner to practice/study Kanji.

Another thing is Kanji often times seem to have multiple readings which further discourages Japanese learners to even bother with them.

It would seem the Chinese users certainly outnumber the Japanese users, but when they have the live feed up I saw a decent amount of kana float by.

I'm learning Japanese and of course kanji (skritter!).

@Bohan, if you learn speaking, listenting and kana, then you're learning only spoken Japanese (not a bad thing, of course), but if you want to read Japanese, you need to know kanji.

Using some tools you can get furigana (reading in kana), but in that case, you're not reading written Japanese, just reading a phonetic transcription.

About 20% of our active users are studying Japanese, though the rate of new Japanese users is higher than that, closer to a third, so it's gradually becoming more equal.

After my current set of projects relating to vocab lists are done I plan to focus on a few outstanding deficiencies on the Japanese side, which will hopefully make Skritter that much more appealing to Japanese students!

Is there a possibility that mnemonics for Chinese character be 'katakana' or
that of 'kanji' by 'pingyin' ? Mainly for older learners .

kanji is absolutely essential unless you don't mind only being able to read street signs that are romanized, and have no interest in literature.

I can't wait for the japanese side improvements! Looking forward to it!

Because of my increasing involvement in the Taipei manga scene, I too have begun studying Japanese!

Japanese is what brought me here. Once I got settled in, I started picking up Chinese too.

All of my Japanese classes in college were on spoken Japanese. Taking classes on writing was optional. I avoided Kanji because I was worried about being overloaded. At that time it felt like my brain was melting just from studying the spoken part. Now that I'm out of college I can study at my own pace. I study kanji a little each day using Skritter, I'm much happier now that I'm free of the craming. I like that I am really learning due to the extra time I spend on mnemonics and SRS.