I've got to the point where my Skritter knowledge has caught up to my real-world Chinese knowledge. What I noticed is an immediate jump in my review queue.

Up to this point it's been incremental, e.g. instead of waking up to 150 items, it's 170, then 200, 230, 260, etc. Lately it's been around 350. Then last week--BAM!--600 items to review.

I've tried, with serious difficulty, to get this down to zero. I have a limited amount of time to practice (about an hour per day), so longer hours isn't really an option. Short of just getting better at Chinese, I'm not sure what to do.

I notice that lots of vocab are permutations of stuff I already know: 出租车，开车，车子，坐车，自行车，车站，叫车... I never get this stuff wrong, so I'm hoping these words will eventually go away. Then again, I keep adding them, so maybe not!

A funny side issue is the introduction of new items. When I first realized I wouldn't be getting my review queue down to 0, I upped my new character frequency. This worked for awhile, but I still wasn't seeing as much new material as I wanted. I had to grab new items from my Queue and Active Lists and force them in through Cramming.

--(By the way, this is where an "Add New Item Now" button would really come in handy.)


My question is for anyone, and especially for people who have been around here awhile. I'm interested in what your experience are. How do you deal with those long review queues?

What I tend to do when this happens is simply change the Add Word Frequency settings under vocabulary > options from "Pretty frequently" to "from time to time" which gives a bit of breathing space.

Having said this (and I'm not sure how the math works out), I've found that by the time you've got a hefty review queue with hundreds upon hundreds of items all at different stages, then getting down to zero is - for stretches of time - going to be a problem anyway, particularly with all those words made up of permutations of already learned characters. So one way I deal with this is by being more relaxed about not going down to zero than I was before. Sometimes (working, like you, for an hour or so a day) the "shape" of the queue is such that I can easily get back to zero; sometimes it is such that I stop at 300 or so. But progress overall is good.

I also try not to worry so much about getting the queue down to zero. I just keep a fairly consistent amount of practice every day and it works itself out eventually.

Yes, the only thing that works (which might be hard to fit in the schedule) for me is:

1. Keep regular practice.
2. Make it even, not 2 hours one day and then 0 minutes the next, rather 1 or 2 hours per day.

I don't usually bother too much trying to get the queue down to zero. Many of the items I probably haven't seen for a month, so another couple of days won't matter.

Like others have said, the best thing to do is practice everyday for the same amount of time. I manage a fairly consistent 30 minutes a day. This gets me nice, steady progress of about 25 characters a week.

If things are really getting overwhelming, I just pause my lists for a while until I feel on top of things.

Keep in mind that the size of your queue is partially a reflection of your past rate of adding new items. If you add new items very frequently, you will get bigger and bigger queues down the road until you finally slow down the rate of adding new items.

James

It sounds like you're coming up on a large area of study that has been approaching for some time now. A lot of these items were last studied/added around the same time I'm guessing? We add some randomness to when things are scheduled, so this large block is probably a hill. At some point it will peak then gradually go back down again. One goal with the next iteration of the scheduling system will be to make sure things like this are more spread out, one way or another.

I've got the 'Add now' button on my list of things to do. It probably won't take long so I'll try to get it done next week.

Cool, thanks everyone. Nice to know it's not permanent... then again, long queues shouldn't be too big a problem. I mean, we *are* learning Chinese here :-)

thinkbudddha, Nicki--I do notice an anxiety about getting the queue down to zero. I should drop this. The suggestions about regular practice habits are good too.

As a curiosity, how many items on average do you Skritterers wake up to each day?

It's funny, I had this exact same experience, and there's a forum post around somewhere with a similar story. I basically just forced myself to get through the queue and study every day. And then adjust my new items down. Now I've got it to about 15-25 minutes max per day (sometimes less if I'm focused.)

However, I still think that there could me some fine tuning skritter-side in this regard. It can be very discouraging to get overwhelmed.

jazz sax Murray James??

Yes, Skritter can definitely improve its scheduling, especially its handling of easy ones and easy characters in new words. I've got a lot of ideas for this.

jkatz100--haha, you betcha. who's this?

What is needed, in my opinion is also

1. Some sort of hinting that if you add more chars now, you are likely to build up a backlash hill that will hit in a couple of hours, days, weeks..

2. A way of coping with a non-even schedule. If I have 4 hours to spend throughout a day, I now try to spread them out to cope with "soon" repetitions as soon as possible, but I sometimes add a lot more new words/chars than would be really sane.

Couldn't we have a "cram"-type of mode, where you actually can go back and refresh old chars that aren't really due for repetition, but is better repeated than adding more burden to the future heap?

Right now I spend more than 1 hour each day and try to stop as soon as I have 0 in the "review queue" which often means that I'm not adding more than 30-50 per day. When having less time in the future, this will probably hurt.

Ok, first of all I have to say that this method is really paying off for me. I seem to be able to pull it all together now. My rate of progess is very good I find. However, 2 things are a bit annoying and both are related to the scheduling algorithm I think:

1. A lot of simple character that I know since eternity, seem to continue to pop up, especially if they are part of a word. Somehow we should be able to skip over these, Either automatically, either by forcing the program. An idea would be to have a 4rd mode: now we have (1)hanzi + tones; (2) hanzi alone; (3) tone alone. (4) could be some difficult characters out of a word and only those.

2. The algorithm that evaluates the % you know a character seems to take into account the total time you spend on that character. The problem is that chinesepod lists sometimes contain set phrases consisting of 7,8,9,...characters. These phrases keep popping up. It is really boring to keep putting them in time after time, knowing that you can not beat the system. I have tried deleting them from the list, but as I can only access 10 lists and the offending phrases are not part of those, is just is not possible.

Bodin, you can already overpractice if you pause all lists or set your add word frequency really low; it automatically starts reviewing stuff that's not ready yet. You can use it to get significantly ahead on your reviews. Whenever I'm practicing regularly with the default settings, my review queues stay low because I've usually practiced all the long-term stuff due for the next couple days. It sounds like the add word frequency is too high if you're adding too much by the time you hit 0 to review.

Marchey, I'll be working on something for point 1 to skip a bunch of easier characters when they're not the question of interest. And the scheduling currently only determines right/wrong; it doesn't take into account time spent or thinking time yet.

Thanks. It is still not a burden, and I love the fast progress.
But as marchey put it, we probably soon need a way to look at all our active lists somehow, and not only the first 10. Right now I can only pause the 10 I see, and as I am greedy, I of course have more than that.

Murray- I'm Josh, sax guy, from Chengdu. Heard you're around?

What's up man? I'm coming in two weeks. Email me -- murrayjames@murrayjames.net