For those of you who are trying for the Extreme Challenge, I'm curious about what kind of progress you're making in your studies. Have you learned a lot? Do you feel that it's productive to Skritter an hour or more per day, or do you think that maybe it would be more efficient to study half an hour on Skritter and then half an hour doing something else?

I'll share my own progress, although it's not super impressive and probably not at all representative. I was traveling in April, so by the beginning of May I had a huge backlog of well over a thousand items. I started on the challenge on May 4th and so far I've studied 23.8 hours according to the Progress page. As a result I've cleared my backlog and am now up 172 words, 147 readings, 147 definitions, and 159 tones from where I started. (I am studying all parts except tones, and both simplified and traditional Chinese.)

I would have to say that, although I'm happy to have cleared the backlog, my progress has been slower than I thought it would be. I suspect that studying definitions sucks up a lot of time.

I'm curious to hear other people's progress reports, both positive and negative.

James

I've learnt 258 characters since the challenge started. Definitely worth it. Need to get another 6 hours in overall to complete the challenge.

I did not have any back log but recently nuked my account so some words I do add are words i once did know. Learned some 400+ characters and 600+ words. The real benefit with this is that i have added more time to study this period. In that way it have been very good. Even with all my traveling I have been able to keep to the average and that I am very pleased with. Nice challenge that I gladly like to do again even without any prices. Back to this with badges again:-) About definitions, well, that takes longer time but is in many ways more important that writing i feel. I use Anki in conjunction with Skritter for this on planes etc.

I think it would have been better to have a 30 min per day (every day) challenge. An hour on Skritter is like 2.5 real hours ; too much time

But then it wouldn't be EXTREME!!!

@Mandarinboy how often do you nuke your account? And how many of the "400+ characters and 600+ words" were new?

James

I've added a lot of new words and characters, well over 100 of each and it has certainly been worth it, but the flip side is that I haven't had time to do much study other than Skritter. I'm looking forward to completing the challenge (2 hours to go!) so I can then get on with some reading or other forms of study.

I have found Skritter is a great tool, but it has to be used with other study methods otherwise it doesn't really work. This challenge has set me up hugely as I'm now over 1000 words learnt, I just have to go out and start to use them more, both in my own writing and reading so that I get the most benefit from a long painful month! :)

like you @jww1066, i had a massive backlog, way over 1000 too. but already done 23+ hours towards the challenge. i'm studying all 4 aspects so takes longer to get more characters and words etc, but i'm up to 91 new characters, 382 char. defs, 174 read, 115 tone, and then 214 words, 225 word def, word read 250, word tone 284.

@Bohan, i know what you mean that 1 hour is like 2.5 real time, but like jww1066 said it wouldn't be extreme otherwise would it?

but love the challenge, really makes me sit down and study and learn new stuff. ideally would love to get up to 200 new characters before the end of the challenge, but i'm hoping doing the challenging will challenge me to carry on putting in the hours after the challenge ends.

I did not join the challenge but had my own extreme session for the last week in preparation of an HSK this Sunday. I did one hour for seven days compared to the usual half hour per day that I am putting in.

There has been a surge in new words added to my known list, which is very positive. I am a bit concerned what will happen next week when falling back to my normal cruising speed. Hopefully the inevitable backlog will not be too big, to quickly get over it.

In summary and in my experience extreme skrittering is a worthwhile exercise but very time intensive.

It would be nice to have another extreme challenge in August. Many people have more time/ are on holidays. I would be keen to join then.

In passing a little motivational reminder for Nick: if by that time the iOS app could come out that would just simply be fantastic. Not having to be glued to the computer but actually doing your skrittering while you are out and about would be a real improvement. No pressure though! I understand that this is a big task...

I would say the challenge has been a big success for me. I am putting in a lot more time than I would otherwise. My sense is that the number of words learned per minute of time has gone up, though not as dramatically as I might have hoped. Still, I feel I am within the zone of increasing returns, and I would probably do 20 minutes a day without the challenge, and maybe 40 minutes a day on weekends. Pushing harder has definitely been rewarding, and not surprisingly the number of instances where a word I have been working on in Skritter pops up somewhere else has been increasing, so I am enjoying some leverage there also.

As for the "mistake" I am not too worried. I think its a fiendish plot to make us Skritter addicts even more addicted, so in the long run customer retention will benefit.

I wrote a response to this last night, but it was late, so I must have forgotten to actually post it.

I've made about 150 characters and about 575 words worth of progress, but a ton of it is just 'flashcard knowledge' - I don't know it outside of Skritter - I need to get into gear with contextualized learning like Mandarinboy has advocated.

Once I'm done with the challenge (about 4 1/2 Skritter hours away), I plan on scaling way back on Skritter and maybe trying to go into a holding pattern while I try to do some more reading and writing, as well as talking more to my coworkers and people on the street, so I can start to contextualize a lot of this vocabulary. Of my nearly 3,000 words on Skritter now, there are probably 1,000 for which the usage is still a mystery to me, and that needs to change.

@Bohan - two and a half hours? I know I'm kind've screwing myself with this kind of speed, but I can do a 20 minute Skritter burst in 25-30 minutes if I'm not getting a bunch of new stuff (since I try to add some extra words with each new character, which has kept my queue nice and robust during the challenge). I've probably put in an average of 80-90 minutes for every hour during the challenge.

My top 14 days total almost 14 hours, so I have to average just over an hour the next 11 days, I'm positively surprised!

@FatDragon that's a good way to do it, a 20-minute Skritter burst in 25-30 minutes, I haven't been so structured and even have spent half a day on my tablet doing Skritter but not getting further than 1,5 hour (mind wondering everywhere)... Really depends on concentration, so your method should be most efficient (for me at least).

Wow, looks like people have been making a lot of progress. That's fantastic! I wonder how this will compare to previous challenges in terms of the amount learned.

@FatDragon I'm also desperately in need of more context. I have found that my reading abilities have gone from awful to significantly better than awful over the last year, I think because I've hit a critical mass of words, so this should be a problem that solves itself with more and more reading.

James

@james, I guess that about 50% of the words are words that i have "known" in the past. I nuke my account 2-3 times a year. The reason is mainly that i do get words that are pushed years in to the future but for me they are barely in my memory and i need to review them again earlier. Even words that i did know 100% just days ago can often totally disappear from my memory. I recently had a nice such day in Korea. Had been traveling a lot for weeks and woke up in the hotel and had no idea what country or city i where in so I had to call the reception to ask where I where. My life is fun with this brain:-)

The challenge has been really amazing for me; I don't know exactly how many new characters I've learned, but several hundred anyway. I should say that I resisted learning to write Chinese for a long time, until I joined skritter. So, many of these words I already knew how to read and pronounce, just not how to write.

But thanks to the challenge my writing has now basically caught up with my other skills, which is great. And I am well and truly addicted now; I think I might even try to keep doing something close to one hour a day on a regular basis.

@podster: What is this "mistake" to which you refer?

@junglegirl great to hear it. It's a very positive thing to be addicted to. ;)

The "mistake" refers to the idea that the Skritter guys might have to give away a whole lot of tablets at the end of the month, as there were around 50 people in the running when the newsletter came out.

James

Great experience! I really enjoyed it. The challenge was also one of the best things that could've happened for my Chinese studies. Just before the challenge started I had a Midyear Chinese exam. therefore I started the challenge with a backlog of almost 3000. So glad I could clear that. I am now op to about 200 new characters learned.

As long as I am not contextualizing my Chinese - more than just my textbook, I hope to keep up with 1 hour a day. I also use 20 min study bursts taking me also about 25-30 mins each.

I want to read more, and hope to try out Mandarinboy's program. Then I might tone down a bit again with the Skrittering.

PS: Have anyone tried http://www.wordchamp.com/lingua2/Reader.do for Mandarin yet? I used it with great satisfaction with German and Spanish.

What is Mandarin boy's program everyone keeps mentioning?

This one: http://www.skritter.com/forum/topic?id=95128672

I had mixed results with the challenge. At first, it was great to add all the readings for characters and words for which I previously had only the writings and tones.

Once I cleared that backlog, however, I found that I was spending too much time memorizing characters for which I had no context. As I am currently taking an intensive graduate-level financial mathematics course, I simply don't have the time to work through the _Integrated Chinese_ chapters or even Chinesepod lessons fast enough to keep up with the Skrittering. I think I added all the new HSK 1-3 and about half of the 4 characters (that I didn't have already) so far and have no clue how to use them.

I did learn that I can add a lot of characters and words per week if I need to. Should be no problem doing a textbook chapter plus a few Chinesepod lessons a week in the future. Once my fin math class is finished, ugh.

Progress == complete*!

Phew, quite a month (well 25 days at least). I skipped a few days due to a wedding and work deadlines so making up those missed hours up was harder than expected. My brain shuts down after an hour. Like everyone though else I didn't even come close to keeping up with context for all the new words/characters. Since I was adding stuff from the HSK lists I would have had to learn it anyway sooner or later.

(*I hope I calculated right ... *runs off to add up all the days again*)

I just completed the challenge too! :)

I found 30 mins is the right time for me. After that I can't concentrate, I need to get up, multitask, ...

I still miss example sentences (Japanese!) as without context you can't really understand many words.

Yea, the calculation thing. Hehehehehe. It does not matter how many times I calculate it, I still want to do it once more. I guess its because Skritter gives different units depending on the amount of time. For example. One day, I studied 2.46 hours. But that is not 2 hours and 46 min. That is 2 hours and 46% of a hour. Therefore 27.6 min. And because I studies so long that day all the other days in that week are given in percentages of an hour instead of minutes. Then on other weeks, its given in minutes.

@ Nick = could we not possibly keep it in 1 unit and just change the size between the units if you study way more one day?

Another possible suggestion for a future extreme challenge: Instead of average 25hours in 25 days out of a month, rather 1 hour a day for 25 days, but not consecutive. For example. You can skip any 5 days, but for 25 days you must do 1 hour a day. Some Sundays I don't feel like doing anything at all, and just want to relax. What do you guys think?

I must go and finish my last hour (I hope!:)... Cheers

@aharlekyn

I think you can skip days, and Nick will just pick your best 25 days out of the 31 days in this month. Can anyone confirm this, yet again? Otherwise I'm in trouble I think :-)

As far as I know, the rules are pretty lenient, your best 25 days out of the 31, and you can skip as many days as you want, for e.g. do 5 hours in 5 days = 25 hours.

Nick's post under this blog:
http://blog.skritter.com/2011/05/last-day-to-enter-contest.html
_________
you could actually start studying later than today by studying more than one hour a day later in this month. It's just that today is the last day that you could start your 25-day streak if you were just going to do one hour every day. since 25 days from now, the contest will be over.

You could also have count the streak from May 1 to May 25. I'll just look for your most-prolific 25 days this month and add things up.
_________

And Nick's answer on the '25 consecutive days':
http://www.skritter.cn/forum/topic?id=90981790&comments=17
________
I'm just going to be looking at your most intense 25-day period between May 1 and June 1, and seeing if there are 25 total hours in it. You could totally skip some days, like if you were traveling, and make up for them on other days.
________

Yeah, but it has to be 25 consecutive days, not the best 25 out of 31. Right?

@junglegirl
Pffff.. I think you're right, I totally misread it, he actually says 'your most intense 25-day period', so 25 days in a row.

Glad I read this, otherwise would have messed it up. Hope others realize this as well.

There's a saying at my gym that if you want to develop a new habit (let's say going to the gym), do it five days in a row. Then when the five days are over it'll already be a habit.

I finished the challenge last Friday and took the weekend off. But then over Monday and Tuesday I studied a total of four hours. Now I'm worried that the challenge might have deepened my Skritter addiction.

James

Ha, I'm afraid I'm going to kick into one of those months-long periods of "Items Due" building after this challenge - I've been busier these last few weeks at my job than almost ever before, and that's been without the Skritter challenge. Combine that with the most eventful and stressful birthday of my life yesterday and I was afraid I wasn't going to make it to 25 hours for the challenge today, but I'm 15 minutes from finishing now, so things seem to be coming out on a more even keel now.

Anyway, I'm definitely planning on taking a day or two off from Skritter after tonight - it gets old canceling visits from long-estranged friends on the excuse of an online flashcard program...

Like some others, I had built up a big backlog (>> 1000)due to other issues (work, believe it or not!) and was in despair that I wouldn't be able to work it off. The challenge was just what I needed. I did a "save me" to distribute the backlog over two weeks and then jumped in. The pig is most of the way through the python now and I'm feeling upbeat again.
I will have to say, though, that the challenge changed my study pattern somewhat. I am much more aware of whether the timer is running or not. On new characters, I like to erase and redraw them several times rather than just scoring them '1' and waiting for them to come back. Now I'm just being pretty brutal and marking things down if I'm not satisfied with my response and quickly moving on. I'm not sure if this pattern is any better or worse than pondering over a character I've missed, but it is a different pattern for me.
With my big backlog, I'm not sure I've netted many characters/words. And I'm just a couple of hours from the finish line...

@kaysik - my situation is similar to yours - My Chinese husband's family speaks no English, but being from Shanghai they're not going to start speaking Mandarin until I learn some.

The challenge has been good for me because my tutor is unavailable the next couple months (she's visiting Taiwan), so this has given me a chance to really increase my vocabulary and get a grip on the characters for words that I've been using in speaking and listening practice. I've also picked up lots of new vocabulary, but I know this will be useful when my tutor returns.

It have been an fantastic challenge. I have often done 1+ hours in a row but that is not really good compared to do multiple shorter sessions. Since I have been doing some extensive travelling across most continents this period I have not been able to do 1 hour sessions but had to do multiple 10-20 minutes sessions ( real clock minutes). This have made much more of the learning to actually stay in my weak memory. I have also tried to use the words i have added in context and this have further helped. A fun thing is that I am in the US right now and have actually had to use my Chinese a few times. Don't know if my English is that bad or if it is theirs but switching to Chinese speeded up the purchases. My goal is to do minimum 20 minutes skritter per day but now I will try to increase that to at least 30. I think that the challenge actually have brought me up to a higher level. Really helpful challenge and I am already looking forward to future ones.

I guess I'm through with the challenge as well. It's been a bit tough as 25 skritter hours amount up to 50 or more real hours, yet it's been fruitful.

My stats got up by 180 new characters, and about 450 new words. Now I'm hoping to give this "skeleton" chinese some meat by watching some chinese films and I suggest the same to everyone else :).

looks like I learned about 400 characters and 200 words during the challenge.

Skritter says I studied 42 hours = 85 minutes a day, but I probably studied up to 2 or 3 hours a day, looking for meanings and mnemonics on MDBG and Zhongwen.com, with the occasional side trip to chineseetymology.org etc.

the challenge has been a really good motivator for me. I hope I can keep studying at this kind of pace now that the challenge is over. I need a new challenge!

two ways in which doing this was easy for me: years ago I studied close to a thousand characters, so some of this speedy learning is actually re-learning or consolidating old knowledge. Also I had a fair amount of free time and a flexible schedule.