I've really been thinking about this for the past few months, and have been debating bringing it up. I've actually started writing about it in the forums and suggestion box a few times, but then decided not to talk about it. I was thinking that maybe I just needed to get all caught up and into a regular routine with my practice.

However, despite having a fairly regular study schedule, and doing most of my reviews every day, I still think that the way skritter adds new vocabulary is broken. Or at least not optimal. What almost always happens is that it will wait until my daily reviews are up and then deluge me with a bunch of new words. At a certain point I just log off, because I know that if I get more than 5 or 6 new characters at a time, I will be struggling too much over the next few days to learn them.

Alternatively, in times when I have a huge backlog, it will pepper me with random new words, even if I have say 150 review items queued. Unfortunately I only have limited time per day to practice.

I wish there was some better way to add words. For instance, could skritter recognize my average practice time per day, and base the new characters on that? Or something to that effect? I don't know, just bringing up the subject because sometimes I'm hesitant to log in and practice because of time constraints and fear of suddenly having a ton of new characters when I haven't even caught up with the old ones.

You can adjust the word adding frequency under Vocabulary --> Options

Yes, I'm obviously aware of that. However it doesn't speak to my main point. All of the characters are added in one huge stack.

I think they are doing better at adding them more randomly than they used to, but I agree, sometimes it does seem a big stack of new words comes through. It sounded like you were frustrated because the big stacks were coming at certain times when you don't want them...like when you have a lot to review. If you feel you've already added enough for the day, why not go over to options and adjust down to "rarely" until you feel ready for more?

or if you are adding from lists... hit the pause buttons on the bottom if you have already added a few words and don't feel like you can handle more, or need to review and don't want new ones during a session, that's what I try to do anyway.

I know what you mean JB - it doesn't bother me as I practice characters offline first (I learn them in class) so when I get to them in Skritter they aren't really "new" at all.

The problem is that if you have a lot of characters to practice and limited time, the system shouldn't give any new characters whereas if you have a lot of time to skrit the system should do a mix of reviews and new characters. Unfortunately the system doesn't know (a) how long you have and (b) how long it will take you to review (e.g. you might get all the reviews wrong and not make any progress at all if you are tired and drunk when you skrit).

The system thus has to use some heuristics and those heuristics are based on the review settings page (as an aside Vocabulary Options are a type of setting and should be under the settings menu - I hate it when programs have both "options" and "settings" as they are synonymous).

Ideally the heuristics would use a combination of 1) length of review queue, 2) estimated time taken to get through the review queue (by the logged in user), 3) estimated anticipated practice time (per day, by the logged in user), 5) estimated time to get through new words (including reviews), and 4) the "settings" value. This could be a difficult algorithm - if the system thinks I will practice 1/2 hour and take 20 min to review leaving 10 minutes for new words (and it takes me 2 minutes per new word on reviews whether I learn it or not in the first day) the system should introduce 5 new words during my skritting - with a bit of a bias towards the second-half of my skritting so that if I end early I will have done more review than new learning.

Part of me thinks, though, that adding a bunch of new words at the end isn't a bad thing. It takes the function of a preview for the next time you skrit and lets you know when your reviews are (basically) over.

I guess the other option is to give the user more control (i.e. put the "setting" on the practice page). Sometimes I want to get all the words from a new lesson in Skritter right away as I learned them in class but would forget them if I didn't skrit them regularly.

I'm all for giving users more control, but hesitant to retool a scheduling system based on the personal preferences of some users. There has to be a way to satisfy everyone, or close to it.

In my case, the scheduling works just fine. Each day I pound through that review queue, working toward those coveted new items. If they tend to clump together, that's never bothered me. I like the challenge of busting a sweat to get to the new stuff.

If anything I have the opposite concern. I'm adding around 5 new characters, 10-20 new words a day. My review queues are getting longer; with pinyin practice, they'll get longer still. Eventually my queues will be too long to work through in one sitting. I want to make sure I see new material every day, even on days I can't get the queue down to zero.

What this reflects is different styles of learning. I would sooner see too many new items than too few; JB, on the other hand, is flustered by a deluge of new items he can't control. But then JB's practice goals and routines may be different from mine. A great thing about Skritter is the ability to practice as frequently (or infrequently) as we want, for as long as we want. I would hate to see this compromised by a "one-fits-all" scheduling system.

It's also important to find a balance between 1) allowing experienced users the ability to tweak and customize; and 2) keeping the general Skritter experience intuitive for everyone. It sounds like the Skritter crew is very aware of this, though, so I wouldn't be too worried.

By the way, Nick mentioned this issue in a blog post earlier this month:
http://blog.skritter.com/2009/08/genius-bug-fixed.html

Nick and I just had a conversation about this. We both would like to have words added throughout conversation, but yeah you're right, 2shanghai, there's a lot to consider when making a better system. So when we work on changing the way words get added we'll want to spend a good amount of time working on it and tweaking it to make sure there aren't unintended consequences. It'll be a tough balance to make but if we can do it it will be very rewarding.

So for the near term we're going to implement a manual add button. You click it and in a few prompts a new word will show up (because it takes time to add a word and get the necessary data). This will allow people more control of when words get added and how frequently, and will hopefully be a good stopgap measure until we can really overhaul the current system to all of our satisfaction. How does that sound?

Oh and almost forgot, as part of the reshuffling we'll be putting the vocabulary options in the settings page, so already on it, 2shanghai. And JB it's good for you to speak up! We've gotta know what's bugging our users; that's the best part of having you guys, you give such great feedback.

Excellent - thanks guys!

Cool, that's really awesome guys. I think one of my problems is just the frequency and duration of my practice periods. Since I work full time, if I have plans in the evening, I sometimes don't have time to practice for 30 minutes. But on the weekend I might be able to practice for an hour or two in a sitting. But if I do that, and get a ton of new words, when I get back to the weekday short-duration practice I have too many new words that I get stuck on.

Anyway, I know you guys will refine and improve things over time, but I thought I would throw this out there. If you have an "add" button, is there any way to have the reverse? A "pause all" button so that no new words will be added? I know you can pause lists, but there's no way to pause your person queue it seems...

Very cool - thx!