Not complaining but since I've started, I've breezed through 1000-characters in about 30 hours of usage (1-month or so).

Starting on Integrated Chinese II and BOYA Pre-Intermediate / Intermediate. After finishing BOYA, moving on to Advanced Contemporary Short Stories / Newspaper Readings and vocabulary gleaned from those sources.

I seem to be remembering all of the characters and words easily, am I doing something wrong?

Put my weekly numbers in a spreadsheet:
Total: 33.61 hours
Average Characters / Hour: 28.86

Most recent week characters / hour: 22.18 (seems to be averaging around 20-22 the past three weeks, the early weeks with easier characters have been in the 30s-40s)

At this rate, I will reach 2000 characters on December 8, 2500 before the end of the year.

The average Skritter user learns a new item every 54 seconds so you're a little below average, but if you're happy with it, its still ok. 加油

Well, I've learned 2000 characters in just under 400 hours, so I have no idea how you managed 1000 in 30 hours. That does not not seem humanly possible unless you study outside of skritter.

Well, I´m learning a new item more like in 54 minutes.....

@ricksh

Highly doubt the 54 second statistic, given a random sampling of forum users, would like to see Skritter admins post up some data / statistics surrounding that (maybe they calculate it differently?)

I spotted this statistic at http://www.skritter.com/learn_more

Just think about what that entails. You could learn every Chinese character in existence in less than a year.

I assume it includes tones and definitions as well, so maybe as an average it's true... but I'm still sceptical.

The last Skritter monthly newsletter had these stats at the bottom:
All learners (this month*):
Hours: 18,475 (2.1 years!)
Average retention: 86.23%
Items studied: 12,856,320
New characters learned: 299,796

If we look at just new chars over the entire learning usage (probably "Skritter time"), that would be 299,796 / 18475 = 16.2 characters per Skritter hour. But keep in mind, this is AGGREGATED over all users. You'd have to divide by the number of Skritter users, which we don't know. But, the newsletter said the highest person's usage was 96 hours. Hence, there must be at least 18475 / 96 = 192 users. So, this then becomes 16.2 / 192 = 0.084 new characters per Skritter hour (one character roughly every 12 hours). Since we know that there are many, many users who don't use it for 96 hours in a month, and we know that Skritter time runs much slower than real-time, this means the true "new character learning rate" is significantly lower than one character per 12 hours.

Apomixis your math is incorrect. The first calculation of 16.2 new characters per hour is correct, there is no need to know the number of people.

To answer the op, I think that sounds like a lot of new characters very quickly. I'm guessing that you already knew how to read (or maybe even write) a lot of them already, am I right?

I see no fault in adding characters quickly, as long as you keep your retention rate high and don't neglect to study other areas of Chinese.

@xiaokaka: My calculations are fine, but I didn't state the units correctly to match my analysis. The 16.2 is the number of new characters learned on Skritter per Skritter hour across all users. But if you want to estimate the number of these learned on a per-user basis, you must divide by the number of people. And the "lowest user estimate" boundary is correctly calculated above as 192. Hence, the mean number of new characters learned per Skritter hour per user has an upper limit of one character per ~12 hours (16.2/192). The OP was asking about individual Skritter learning rates, not aggregate Skritter rates. Hence a measure of the average new chars/hour/user is much more appropriate.

Why would you want to know the new units per hour per user?

These are my stats from my public profile.

Time Spent 205 hours
Characters 2205 learned
Words 3053 learned

My new items per hour = (2205+3053)/205 = 25.64. And my new characters per hour = 10.76. These numbers are quite close to 16.2, and a lot higher than 16.2/192.

Edit: An example.

Say that Skritter consists of three user, each skrittering for one hour and learning 10 characters. That means that the aggregate number of new characters = 30 and the number of hours studied = 3. Which is the most meaningful statistic, that the average number of new characters per hour = 30/3 = 10 or that the new characters per hour per user = 30/3/3 = 3.33?

The 54-seconds-per-item stat was calculated not based on character writings learned, but on all of character writings, tones, readings, and definitions, plus word writings, tones, readings, and definitions. (We did the calculation for Chinese.) So you might get a bunch of items learned from learning a single word, since it has multiple parts and multiple sub-characters with their multiple parts. It's not just about character writings.

~22 characters per hour (past the first bit) is pretty good. When I started, I averaged 24 characters per hour up to the first 2000 characters, but I was only doing writings and tones, since we didn't have readings and definitions yet. (The app was much worse in many other ways, too.) That said, I did know how to write about 550 of those characters from classroom study.

It does slow down as you get more reviews, and yeah, there's more than characters to learn but hey, you're blazing through those 字 now, so learn characters while the character learning is good!

@xiaokaka: Ouch, I concede! I'm wrong. Once I sat down and wrote things out on paper rather than trying to manipulate figures in my head, it was clear that I was incorrect. The mean is 16.2 and I should not have divided by the 192 figure. So much for my "back of the envelope" calculations! :-)