I have completed HSK word lists 1,2 and 3 which totals 600 words, with an 87% retention.

But my progress says that I have leared just 358 words. Does the 358 refer to something else or is this a bug?

Thanks

I assume you're talking about the graphs on the progress page:
http://www.skritter.com/progress

Are you looking at the "characters" graph or the "words" graph?

James

This leads to an interesting question: if you learn a new word with two syllables I'm assuming Skritter also counts that you've learned two new characters. However, if you learn a new character that is also a word by itself, does it count it as a word or just a character? Now that I'm thinking about the pop-up messages, I can't think of a time it ever said "new word learned" for a single character.

Skritter team, what dost thou say?

I'm looking at "words" learned. One word can consist of say three characters, and then again the same characters are used in multpile words.

However, HSK 1-3 contains 600 "words" which I've completed (now working on level 4), and I've only learned 358 words according to the progress page (http://www.skritter.com/progress )

so try adding up words and characters...

Characters are different from words. I think Skritter counts words added only when it is comprised of multiple characters. HSK 1-3 has 600 items and not 600 words. Adding up characters and words should get you 600 unless you also are adding every character within the word as a separate item; in that case, you will have over 600. Also added is different from learned. You may have added 600 items but not yet learned them all.

HSK 1-3 consists of 600 words, so judging by what saudukargeneral is saying Skritter's only counting words with two or more characters which explains where the 358 words come from. And that single character words, ie 我 are not included as a word in the progress list.

Skritter, is that right, and is this something that needs to be fixed?

I ain't Skritter but can tell you that's the way it works. As you get more advanced you'll notice that most words are two characters so it wont make such a noticeable difference in those numbers.

I don't think anything needs to be fixed other than adding a simple explanation, maybe a tool-tip or (?) button somewhere?

Well, the "Words" header on the graphs has a tooltip to that effect, but it's pretty invisible. We'll get it into the documentation that we're working on. Sorry for the confusion, all!

This is a perfect example of the ambiguity of what a "word" is in Chinese as it is much harder to define than in other languages like English.

@Nick, @Thomas: So, in fact, the number of words I really "know" is in fact the following formula:

+ - /2

The rough estimation means that if I've added the radicals list to my learning set, then they are rarely used as a single character/word, hence the 0.5 factor?

Any other way to efficiently (yet rougly) estimate my vocabulary please?

Haha, I guess I am one of those newbies where 500 worlds sounds much better then 420 :))) But still...

This test has shown to be ridiculously accurate in my case.

www.clavisinica.com/character-test-applet.html

ooh, according to that test I know 3503 characters (actually some more since I missclicked one of the defenitions :)

breakphreak, that formula won't work very well at different levels. Beginners have more characters relative to words, whereas if you've studied a ton of lists on Skritter, you probably have more words relative to characters. But that all depends on what kind of lists you've studied.

If you're really interested, you could do an export and count them somehow in Excel or something.