I'm not really sure how the scheduling works, but my impression is that "so-so" means "reschedule it at the same interval". How does this work when we're practicing a word and get a single character wrong?

Just now I was practicing a multi-character word that has a rare character in it, and that word is the only place where I study that rare character. I got everything right in that word except the rare character, which I completely forgot how to write, and Skritter marked the word as "so-so". (This mostly happens to me with words of more than two characters; it seems like Skritter marks the word as "so-so" if I get a certain proportion of the characters right.)

Now, if the word is marked as "so-so", doesn't that mean it's rescheduled at the same interval? So, if the word was last studied 6 months ago, won't it be rescheduled for 6 months from now? And if that's the case, how will I ever learn the rare character? Or is there some kind of special logic that applies when the word is the only place where we're studying a character that we got wrong?

James

I think Nick said it is a little bit more negative than same interval, so perhaps you will see it again in 4,5 months?

That raises an important question. If I jack up the retention rate, does that mean I review words more often? Right now I have the retention rate jacked down and the natural rate of adding words at max to get all of my textbooks uploaded. HOWEVER, the last two text books are full of tons of annoying 书面语 and formal words. Those are a nightmare to retain since most of them you will never hear a Chinese person say and you will never use. Right now, I don't mind if my weekly retention rate plummets, since I am adding words. I do want to review these words more often, though. After this last textbook is uploaded, if I crank up the retention rate to 95%, will I get my desired increase in review prompts for everything?

Yeah, so if you miss a character in a word longer than two characters, you'll get a "so-so" for the word, and it'll be a little less than the interval you just saw. I designed that with the idea that you'd have the individual character active for study and that character would then come up by itself much sooner, so you could work on it and not have to do the whole long word which you got right.

However, that's clearly not always true, since when you haven't added that character by itself, it can't come up. I guess I should add some special case logic like you describe for not doing the so-so thing if that character isn't active.

west316: yes, but the retention rate is very slow to respond to changes, so it will be a gradual process.

Hmmm, that does make sense. Don't worry about complicating the logic, I can just add those individual characters to study.

It does seems like the criteria for "so-so" might be a little too permissive at the moment, but I end up manually grading most words anyway so don't worry that much about me. Unless you feel like adding keystrokes for word grading, which would save me a lot of mouse clicks.

James

What do you think would make good shortcuts for those?

Maybe shift-1 2 3 4, ctrl-1 2 3 4, something like that?

not ctrl-1 2 3 4, please, as that can interfere with the Mac Spaces function.

I don't care about keyboard shortcuts, but I do wish the grading button on the window/toolbar could be used to select "so-so" and "too easy" as well.

jcdoss: I don't! Use it on pretty much every word to correct stuff that Skritter marks wrong, or to mark the character right where the word is wrong. Cycling would just make things longer. That button should be left...

I agree with Byzanti. It should be left as is...

I'll thumb-wrestle you for it. ;-)