I've been using Anki for a several months, and have become accustomed to their "Study Options" pane that greets me when I open the program. I've grown to like how it lets me know when I'm all through reviewing for the day.

My question is this, is there an option like this on Skritter? In other words, how do I know when I've done enough reviewing for the day? Do I just practice as long as I'd like? Or, will it eventually stop me -- and say, "hold on buddy, your brain is full for the day." : )

That's actually an interesting question.
I do know that it is a good idea to spend a similar daily amount of time with practicing. How much percent can I increase or decrease without hindering my performance?
It did happen to me that I during the week could only study for about 30 minutes a day and at the weekend I then had time for an or hour two. What then happened was that I cleared my review list and added tons of new characters. Although that was cool at the time, it meant that I spent the rest of the week trying to work the extra long review queue off. I'm sure that the characters would all have been at 999% (so long overdue in terms of optimal learning) and I was slightly demotivated because it's of course always cooler to get to the stage where at least a few new characters are introduced.

Interesting question indeed...even thought it's much better (in my opinion) to work 30mins to 1h a day that 8h every weekend.

Actually sometime (can be short or long) I feel that I don't learn well, I need more concentration than usual. When I reach that point I stop for few hours !

I am pretty stopping is self-regulated, I usually stop when my mnemonics start to blur together.

We intend for you to be able to practice as much as you like, with some efficiency benefits to studying about the same amount each day.

There are still some inefficiencies with scheduling and with the rate at which words are added which make it less efficient to study a lot one day and have to catch up, as Baifameizhong points out. In the future, that'll be mitigated because it won't add so many at once when you overpractice, instead also getting ahead on your future reviews at the same time.

I've still got a lot of tuning to do on the Genius for that to work smoothly, though. Until then, clearing the review bar and adding a similar number of new items per day is a good guide for how long to study if you want to be maximally efficient.

If you don't have adding enabled, eventually Skritter will say, "There really isn't anything left that you can profitably review, so please add some more words." That only happens when nothing is more than 30% ready, though--very hard to accomplish unless you're just starting out.

Another point on this - I'm finding it useful to break my studying into small chunks throughout the day.
When I started out, I would tend to cluster my time into a single block of an hour or so. This is a natural instinct, particularly since there's a tendency to want to get the review queue down to zero. This worked well initially, but I found that it was causing problems for newer items.

The Spaced Repetition System that Skritter uses is designed to present new items at short intervals, and to gradually increase those intervals as you get the item right. For me, if I'm getting an item right, this means that I'll see repeats after one minute, two minutes, five minutes, ten minutes, etc, eventually working up to an hour, a couple hours, a few hours, etc. I think that this system works in strict accordance to the numerical formula, without considering things like studying schedule, day/night, and other factors.

So with a single study period each day, combined with the fact that Skritter still has a strong tendency to introduce new items only near the end of the review queue, I was seeing a new item, getting a couple very short-interval repeats, and then signing off for a day. Coming back around 24 hours later, I'd have missed a whole bunch of scheduled reviews for the item, and my chances of remembering it were pretty slim, bringing me almost back to starting from scratch.

What I'm doing now is trying to spread my studying throughout the day, in five or ten minute chunks whenever I have a few free minutes. I think this does a much better job of letting me see new items at closer to their proper intervals. For old items, it doesn't make much difference if you miss your scheduled review time by a few hours (or a few days), but for new items I think it's really important.

jpo,

I relate completely.

I recently encountered Sprite, 雪碧, from the NPCR list. I'd practice online for an hour, learn the characters, and forget them overnight.

I was learning Sprite for like a whole week. God, it was awful. Too proud to change my study habits, too stubborn to skip. And so eventually--dammit, how long do I have to learn this stupid character!?!?!

Smaller chunks make learning easier.

I first encountered 雪碧 on the lunch menu in a Chinese restaurant in Wudaokou. I had no idea what it was so asked if it had alcohol in (in Chinese). I felt a bit silly when I found out what it was.

As for breaking things up, this week I've tried an hour every morning before work and an hour when I get back in the evening. This seems to work better than my cramming method, so I'm going to try to stick to that. Ideally I suppose I'd practise a bit in lunch break, but not sure how that will go down.

Incidentally Skritter seems to have settled into a fairly steady state of about 550 characters when I start a review (about 12 hours since the previous one). I can normally get that down to about 250 in 3 hours. It's back up to 550 again by the next review. I don't remember the last time I got to 0 reviews. I also tend to get quite a lot of new words / characters in the review.

Incidentally I'd quite like a study log. Featuring study start time, stop time, reviews outstanding at start and end of study, reviews completed, items added. I'm keeping track of some of these by hand while I get into a new rhythm, but it would be handy if Skritter could do this for me.

murrayjames, the same thing happened to me with 雪碧. Took forever to learn it. I kept forgetting it at the IALLT conference, too, when demoing it to all the teachers that came by. Then I mnemonic'd out on 碧: "King Whiterock." That helped remember it.

I've put better study session stats on the to-do list, ximeng, but it's towards the end.

king white rock! That's a good one, I'll have to remember that.

游 always got me, until my wife told me: 水方子. Haven't forgotten since.

Man, I always forget 游, too. Okay, let's try 水方子, then.

You know, the data is showing that there's a lot of correlation between difficulty of characters across different users. Some characters are just a lot harder or easier than others. Maksym and I are starting the process of analyzing which characters are tough, to incorporate that into the scheduling. I think it will be a huge improvement once that data is in there.

When I realised the 方 often goes with the hat on top of the 子 that helped me with a lot of characters. (Like 旗, 族, 放.)

方 with the hat means banner according to:

http://zhongwen.com/d/180/d229.gif

Thanks ximeng!
I have never noticed that connection before.

A mnemonics system is currently trailing in the poll results, but I still think this would be a tremendously cool feature once you eventually get around to implementing it. I'd love to be able to enter a custom mnemonic for a character, and have it hidden until I'm stumped and hit the "Show mnemonic" button. Being able to browse through other mnemonics that have been entered for a character would be cool, also.

I don't know how to pronounce "mnemonic" but I sure love the way they help me learn! I'd love to see other users ideas too.

I basically cheat myself when I want to review more; in other words, if I got a character but I don't feel I know it or I feel that I want it repeated a few more times in my study session I mark it as not learned. This seems to work well enough for me - a character that I mark as not knowing will keep getting reviewed and when I do feel I know it (and leave it checked) it Skritter will work as designed.