I noticed an interesting behavior and I think it is a bug in the algorithm.

I have completed studying the WRITING portion of several lists with a few thousand entries combined. I do not study the READING or DEFINITION or PINYIN on these words. All the lists have a finished status and I no longer have any list from which I'm adding new words.

Now I turned off the WRITING and turn on only READING and DEFINITION and all I'm getting is the same 10 words over and over again. It seems that the algorithm will not go back and look at the completed lists (for WRITING) and see that READING and DEFINITION are not completed.

I studied the WRITING only to quickly acquire as much character retention as possible. Now that I reached my goal I'm finding that I can write the word when I see the definition and pinyin, but I cannot read many word when I see it in some random chinese text (except to say the character looks familiar). So being able to review the READING and DEFINITION now is important to me.

Is this the expected behavior, or is it a bug in the algorithm? Is there a workaround?

I have seen a problem on the iOS app a few times where it seems to get stuck in a 'loop' of the same few words again and again, displaying 0 due the whole time. This might be a similar problem.

Force quitting Skritter ( http://support.apple.com/kb/ht5137 ) and restarting it fixed the problem for me and I saw the correct number of 'due' items- although I then got a deluge of words that were 'added' while I was in the loop.

I think there is an update coming which will fix and/or help to diagnose these sync issues.

I tired restarting the IOS app and it didn't help. I also tried to run it through the web interface in PC and same problem.

When you turn on a new part, like reading or definition, that you had previously turned off, in the web interface, it asks you if you want it to go back to the beginning on your lists and start adding the new parts. If you say yes, then you'll get the behavior you expected.

When you do it in the iOS app, that part of the interface is yet missing (because it would be rather hairy on the phone), so it doesn't give you the choice to restart your lists.

If you want to get the lists reset, though, then toggle the reading/definition to off and then back on again in your web app study settings until it gives you the list reset dialog: http://www.skritter.com/account/settings-study

I tried the list reset on the web and it looks like it works. I initially switched the settings in the IOS app and this interface was missing.