I am struggling with understanding this with retention rates. I have a personal goal of always be above 94% in total. When I start each day with my first sessions and have many items marked as so so I might be dropping down to less than 90%. However, after an hour or so it starts to sharply go up. I have today studied for almost 2 skritter hours and have a total retention rate for today of 97,8% ( it is possible that a recalculation today have impacted the rate but that too is strange since other days have not been better). I am not sure how this is calculated but it seems very odd to me since i have had a bad day with plenty of so so items. I thought that so so where treated almost as failed and hence there should be a low rate for this. Is it possible to give some clarity in how the retention rate is calculated for different items? Is the weight the same for a tone as for a writing e.g. This with time is the the thing that puzzles me the most. It seems to be always the same, add more time and your rate will go up. This is the situation even when i feel that i have the same number of fails or so so all day long.

My retention rate is mid 80's and for word writings low 70s. I don't use the so so, just right or wrong. I think I push myself to fast and try and add to many new words which is half the problem but I'd like it to be quite a bit higher.

Here are my 2 cents on this, and I have thought a long time about it myself.

Wrong: If I don't get 90% of the character on my own, it is automatically wrong in my eyes. The larger the character is, the more lenient I am with missing a line or 2.

So-So: Some characters, I might need a little nudge to remember what the first stroke is, I usually mark it as so-so.

Good: I remember all of it myself, even if I write part of it out of order or forget a hook.

Easy: Only if I remember it 100% with no hesitation and no mistakes at all.

As far as retention rate goes, my overall retention hovers around 80% with my writing dropping as low as 60% sometimes. I don't try to be unrealistic about this, if I am remembering 80% I am doing pretty good. My students don't remember every character 100% of the time, nor do my coworkers, so why should I expect to be any different from someone who grew up learning it, and lives it day in and day out?

That being said, I have not been studying anything except for Skritter so I might feel different if I were in a classroom setting and absolutely had to remember something for a test.

As a whole, I feel like every aspect of my Chinese has improved significantly, so I feel that whatever I am doing is working out fine for me.

Edit: As far as the so-so still being counted as positive, that should be true because it is still an SRS system. However, if you mark it as so-so it will show up sooner than if you marked it as good or easy.

I can't say this enough, don't be too hard on yourselves. Just like how we forget the spelling of a word in English, the Japanese, Chinese, Taiwanese, Hong Kong people, and anybody else who writes Chinese, they all forget how to write characters, or they write the wrong one, or the wrong radical. Hell, one of my students made a mistake writing 藥 last week, not a mistake you would expect from a kid who has written the character thousands of times at that age.

If you ever wanna know more about how my students learn, funny stories about their Chinese mistakes, or anything like that, I would be happy to share them haha.

Mandarinboy, when you're keeping up with Skritter every day, then apart from adding new words, you'll tend to get your harder reviews at the beginning of the session (they're more due). This could possibly help explain why your retention rate changes throughout the day. And yeah, so-so is an ambiguous case that we've chosen to count as a success for the purposes of calculating retention rates.

Thanks, I did today noted all my words and and Nick is correct, the "hard" ones do come in the beginning and are getting easier by time so that explains why the retention rate is going up over the day. About grading that is very personal and i guess we all use different ways off doing this. My idea is to be very sensitive to the correctness. Agree that even native do forget but the more i repeat them, the more they will stuck. So i try to do it like this: If anything is wrong or it takes more than 3 seconds to get it out or i need any hint I mark it as wrong. If I do get it correct within 3 seconds but fails to properly use the word in context i mark it as so so. If i can directly write it or create an useful sentence with the word i mark it as known. I use 97% retention rate to get lots of exposures to each word and star grade all words that are hard or new for me. After i got my queue down to zero i do a few shorter sessions with the starred words for more repetition. I know that this is probably over exposure but this works for my brain. Our brains can handle roughly 7 items http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Magical_Number_Seven,_Plus_or_Minus_Two in short term memory and the more often we repeat them they gradually will become long term memory. It also depends what we will do with the information. I recently read an article by Benny the Irish polyglot http://www.fluentin3months.com/ He where learning Chinese in very short time and for you who have heard him his Chinese is maybe not the best but he is understood by Chinese. He also claims that Chinese is not harder to learn than E.g. Spanish. That I can agree from a word/grammar point of view but when it comes to writing he do the distinction between writing a character and typing it. If I am only interested in typing i can get away with much less exposure and hence be less strict. It is all about our individual purposes. My goal is to be able to join my father in law in the parks in Hangzhou and write Chinese novels with water on the streets. That is cool and you have a large audience checking wording, spelling and stroke order.

My degree is in chinese studies and business, so I have four hours of class per week. I can safely say 95% of my chinese is from self study, mainly skritter.

Seant018 I think the first character is key a lot of the time. I find so often, I have no idea how to start, but if I have that first stroke I can finish the character.

I was in a Chinese class, but the teacher was never prepared and spent a lot of time teaching us things that were not useful, and she also wanted to teach us Beijing accent even though we live in Taiwan. In about 2 weeks I was ahead of the other students and she would spend must of the class teaching the other students, the ones that never studied at home and needed a lot of attention in class. Needless to say, I thought my money was better spent elsewhere.

Luckily, I am living in Taiwan, so anything I learn I can immediately use, and if I ever have trouble I just ask my friends.

A couple examples from the class, which also show up in Skritter (but its easier to skip over when I use Skritter): 兒 is not added to the end of words in Taiwan, a taxi is 計程車 in Taiwan but it is 出租車 elsewhere. (出租車 is a rental car in Taiwan, I believe.) A lot of little things in the textbook would sound strange here in Taiwan, and the teacher never pointed those things out, she simply taught straight from the book, regardless of it's usefulness in Taiwan.

Sean, if you're in Taipei, I use a tutor at a center near 仁愛敦化 that I'm a fan of. Decent rates, and I think they also have larger class settings, but since I only have time after 8pm, never a possibility for me, so I don't know much about those.

If you want to know more, just tell me!

Thanks nomadwolf but I live in the 桃園 are so that is just a little too far. I'm still looking into a 1 on 1 class but they want 40000nt in one payment, 5 days a week for 4-5 hours a day. I think it would be great for me but I just can't commit that kind of money right now.