http://www.skritter.com/forum/topic?id=71749001

Hey there!

At the link above I've just asked about the time I need to invest each day to skritter. About one month ago I new less then now and 30 minutes per day were just good to learn several new characters daily (which was VERY cool and still is).

Then... about 1 month after each (and every) morning I open skritter I have more characters to go over. I am investing about 60 minutes daily for the same learning curve slope.

I still know very few characters (~300) and I am already worried about my future! (kidding :) How will it proceed? In 2 months - how many items will expect me in the queue to complete it?

Also, if the queue is empty - does it mean I can stop and have a rest OR falling asleep with a busy queue is completely normal thing? :))

Thanks (and also for your mental support :))

Hi,

I don't entirely understand how Skritter decides what to add, but, like you, I found it growing too quickly. Two things you can do:

1.
Don't empty your list every day. Skritter will eventually notice that you have a backlog, and will back off a bit.

This is quite difficult psychologically - it's nice to "finish" - and I worry that it is not efficient. After all, we use Skritter because it is good at reminding us at the best possible time.

2.
Let Skritter schedule your repeats, but keep control of New words yourself, by switching from automatic to manual adding.

To do this, log in, find where it says "you are adding words automatically from the following lists", click on the blue "automatically" so that it changes to "manually". Then click "study all my words", and find a little green circle with a plus-sign in it. Click the green circle to add a word. (It will add one word but all the different study-types you are using - tone, reading, writing etc - so it will say it has added several).

Rachael.

I am adding new words automatically, but slowly. Still, the methodological question persists. As about the rest - it still would be interesting to know a bit more from the other peeps :) Do you guys usually empty your list or what? :))

I suggest you turn down your target retention rate. This will allow you to learn more words while spending less time working on them. Once you learn the words better(bigger spaces between repetition) and you are adding less words(because you are ahead), then you can up your retention rate. I guess I could be wrong, but I assume the difference in time between 90% and 95% chance right characters is double. That suggests you could learn double the characters in the same time with double the errors(10% as opposed to 5%)

As dfoxworthy suggests, turning down target retention rate is useful - 95% is somewhat prohibitively high - overall retention that's too high means that you're focusing too much on perfection with the characters you know, which increases the amount of repetitions for stuff you already know and decreases the rate at which you can add new stuff without increasing your study time - in other words, it places perfectionism over efficiency.

I wouldn't worry too much about keeping ahead of your queue - as you study consistently, the scheduler will rarely deviate too far from your own study habits, so it's not likely to overload you with reviews unless you take some time off - when it gets ahead of you so that you can't clear it in a day, you'll find that it's likely to back off after a few days - it's not AI or anything, it's just how the system works - the more reviews you clear and new items you add, the more new reviews are added, which means that the less stuff you clear, the less stuff is added. In other words, if you have to study a minute longer every day to keep up with your queue, the scheduler will continue to add a little more every day and you'll get yourself into a constant escalation, but if you back off to a steady pace, the queue will adjust to your pace within a few days to a week.