Anyone using 97% retention rate? How's that going?
I don't want to forget older and easier words which might only come up once per year, and studying on the iOS app is much faster as well so I guess changing to 97% should be a good thing.

I am using 97% and that is giving you more repetitions as I like it to be. Note, if you change now it will take some time before you really start to notice it. You need to review the words first.

I went from 95% to 87% a few weeks ago and couldn't recommend it more. Spend that extra time you have on actually reading some Chinese in context!

@Icebear, actually an very valid point of view. From my perspective it do however not take that long time to review this daily since you then also know them better. That means more time to also read a lot. Absolutely recommend to use the words in context as much as possible but many of the more rare ones I learn is not that frequent in books/news/TV so I like to study them in skritter this way. Test and see what suits you best.

Be careful with high retention rates. If you're trying to learn the most, your ideal retention rate should actually be lower. According to supermemo:

"If the forgetting index drops below 3%, the knowledge acquisition rate becomes unacceptably low. On the other hand, the acquisition rate peaks at the forgetting index of about 20%. Above that value, both the retention and acquisition rate decrease."

http://www.supermemo.com/english/princip.htm

20% forgetting index (meaning you miss 20% of the time you're tested on items that are exactly due) equates to about a 90% retention rate (you can remember 90% of the things you're studying at any given time, whether they're due or not). That is the most efficient way to learn, in terms of time-spent to words-learned ratio. But it's also disheartening to get so many wrong, so there's a tradeoff there. Do you want to spend excess time fortifying what you've already learned? Or learn as much as humanly possible?

I set my retention rate to 90%, after drowning in too many reviews at the 97% retention rate (remembered everything almost perfectly, but made little to no progress at all) and forgetting too much at the 87% retention rate (courtesy of not learning things in different contexts, as suggested by icebear). Whatever works for you.

I have set target to 95%, I had it too low in the beginning so changed it, I was considering going to target 97% but maybe I stay at 95%.

Looking at last month result (which I think all has been with target 95) I have the highest retention in character tones (92.2) and the lowest in definition (77.9).

So based on your post (Scott), the optimal rate is 90%? Why isn't that the default? :P

Because it's a compromise between being as efficient as possible and having a good success rate on those things you want to know. For someone studying for a class, for example, knowing only 90% of the things you need to know at any given time might be too low. And perhaps more importantly, it can be discouraging to get so many items wrong when tested (1 in 5, rather than 1 in 10), which can greatly decrease how well you do.

Ok fair enough -that makes sense.

Thanks for the responses! I will stick to 95% because I prefer to be near faultless on my characters. Until now I'm sweeping through my reviews on the iOS app, so fast. If it stays like that for a week while adding regularly, I will switch to 97%.

Of course rating tough will increase repeating characters too, if I'm not sure to rate it so-so or wrong, I will go for wrong more often. And so-so more often than correct.