I was wondering how many hours per week people spent skrittering and how many words were you able to learn over say one year? I'm assuming most people are studying casually as a hobby, but wanted to get some idea of how quickly people were learning who were studying heavily. I try and do about an hour per day and wanted to get an idea of how quickly other people studying to this degree were learning.

I just ran some stats on all Skritter students of Chinese with between 365 and 450 hours of study on the site, and they'd learned a mean of 2128 characters and 3775 words. The range was 945 - 4111 characters and 833 - 9172 words. Quite a lot of variance.

Now, most of these students didn't do one hour a day, but may have done it faster or slower (multiple years). Some may have come in with prior Chinese knowledge, and some may be 108-year-old Russians learning English and Chinese at the same time and watching movies in the background. And some of the fastest learners don't get to 365 hours of study because they're pretty much done with Chinese by then.

But in general, for people studying that many hours, they take 84 seconds to learn and remember each item, which translates into 11 minutes of total Skritter time spent per character writing learned. (If you just look at everyone, it's 54 seconds per item learned, and they get many more new characters in that time since the characters slow down a lot as you get further in.)

By the way, if I include users who have studied more than 450 hours, I see some record stats for Chinese:

Most characters learned is 5310, with three users over 5000
Most words learned is 16972
Most items all told is 57503
Most hours spent is 1100

WOW that's some numbers. I wish I could study chinese full time.

It would be great to have a live league table on the home page, a little similar to the newsletter. Possibly split into this months leader (re-set to sero at beginning of the month) and also all time leaders.

Also think it should be something users opt into through their account settings.

That means if I manage to spend 1.5 hours a day for the next two years i should be able to Learn 3000 Chinese characters with 5000 words and maybe 3000 Japanese and 3000 japanese words as well.
Right?

++ bennyboyk

@Nick: Can you detect any habits or settings shared by the fastest learners? Do they use a high or low retention rate? Do they study in short bursts or in long sessions?

They are indeed impressive numbers. 1100 hours is one a day for 3 years constant, hope I can manage that. I'm guessing initially it is more important to increase your character count then words can be made up very easily after that. I think a leader board is quite interesting, I know the competitive element of memrise encourages me to study more.

Drone, I could do that analysis if I spent some time at it, but my guess is that the fastest learning would be the product of things I can't measure about the person: age, memory, whether they did Heisig, how much they knew coming in, whether they're using a Wacom tablet, etc.

Leaderboards are a feature we want to do eventually, but don't have time for now.

If you can make some (anonymised) usage data available I would be happy to perform a quick statistical analysis on it. The points you list such as "age, memory" etc are all valid, but there is still a lot of information that can be teased out.