Well guys,

I finished all the lists, 2051 characters added.

It has taken 104 hours, retention 96.4%, and each review takes me 6.3 seconds. (I could already identify over 1,000 characters when I started, but I didn't know many of the tones and couldn't write the characters)

I have a few tips I'd like to share:
1. Remember the character tone as part of a word, e.g. remember 容易 as 2-4. Otherwise it gets really confusing when you know ten other "rongs" and "yis", trust me.
2. Don't cheat, if the character doesn't come to mind in 5 seconds you don't know it well enough! Mark it as incorrect and learn it properly, you'll have to do it sometime.
3. Number 2 is important because the key to learning the characters is 部首 (components). My first characters would have taken over an hour to learn properly. But if you master the basic characters the next characters are just pieces of the previous characters re-assembled, this is why it is so important to learn the basic characters well (not doing this was my biggest regret).

Just thought i'd post something to commemorate the occasion.
Has anyone else finished or near it? How are you all progressing?

Congratulations! A huge accomplishment, oh yes. Although now whenever anyone says they're finished, I think of the end of There Will Be Blood and that South Park episode where Wendy beats Cartman to a pulp. I hope you're not at all frothingly lunatical after all that practice!

So that's about 3 minutes spent per character+tone (with some word time in there, too). Not bad. It'll be interesting to see how much more time is added several months down the line, when you're putting all of the characters into really long-term memory. My hopeful estimate is that you've already done 65% of the work you'll need to remember all those for 20 years.

...until we add a bunch more lists (soon). You'll have another 1000 characters to learn when we add the rest of the HSK lists.

I think it'll be very exciting when we get component analysis built into Skritter, so you can memorize characters by components even when you didn't know the components yet. Also interesting will be Remembering the Hanzi support, where it's all designed to build characters in order. Ohhhh yeah.

I'm still pretty far from finishing...
559 characters added, 22 hours studied at a rhythm of 43 minutes/day. Learning 544 characters took me 2357 reviews, and 533 tones 3240 reviews !!! My retention rate is at 87.4% right now.
I agree with Zach concerning the importance of remembering the tones, and the word components: I started with the radical list, it has helped me sooo much!

Nick,
Thanks for having such a great idea for a program, after I finished I just sat at my computer for quarter of an hour wondering what I was going to do with myself.

Something I find interesting about the review time is that it is made up of the 10% of the characters that I get consistently wrong in a cycle of failure. Right now I keep forgetting which way the end of 修 goes when I write quickly!! grrrrr, also, 谴 is a pain lately.

s2682693,
I assume you already had a bit of character experience before skritter? How many characters can you add in a week if you spend about 45min a day? I'm interested in character learning rates of people at different levels.
I'm also interested in your learning technique, your review/time ratio is much lower than mine, do you write the characters one stroke at a time?

Some more of my stats.
Added Reviews
Words 3,870 11,058
Characters 2,051 15,568
Tones 2,049 33,145

(The 2 mystery characters without tones are traditional characters added by errors)

If I could export my progress data I'd analyse the recent data that isn't influenced by the effect of adding so many basic characters that I already knew/semi-knew.

I check skritter many times a day, my weekly time is all over the place. Some near the start are <2 while my peak in one week was 20h!! Overall it is 47min/day

Impressive (or, perhaps, obsessive!)
Starting with the radical list is good advice. I'll get back to it...

> obsessive
Very! Nothing is more frustrating than trying to read in chinese and encountering characters you don't know. Frustration that builds up into an epic crusade against them.

I studied Chinese in Beijing for a bit, I focused on writing only during the first six months though. At my best I think I could write around 800/1000 characters, but when I started Skritter 2 months ago it had been a while. I can still recognize characters easily, but writing has become pretty hard.
I try to add around 100 characters/week, but it's becoming harder since my review time is getting longer and longer. I don't really know what you mean by "one stroke at a time", I sometimes use shortcuts when I can, sometimes no, depending on the character. I don't have much of a learning technique per se, when I get a new word I write it on Skritter, then a few times on a sheet of paper (because a screen can't replace actually writing characters). When reviewing I just write once on Skritter, sometimes two-three times if I'm not satisfied.
I try as much as possible to be regular, so I make time for skritter everyday (I usually start my day with it), and usually the same amount of time (around 45 min).
I think regularity is important for memory somehow.
I wanted to ask your point of view guys, is the mdbg character quizz worth doing or not?

Well uhhh... I've finished reading all the Forum posts? ^_^;

I'm up to about 780 characters. I use Skritter mainly for my 2nd-year Chinese class and we're on break right now. I'm waiting for my new Bamboo tablet to come in and do some more glorious studying.

I just tried out the MDBG character quiz, and it seems pretty neat. You could use it to validate the effectiveness of Skritter training, or you could get new ideas for characters that you want to add to your personal queue (when we implement that, soon).

Regularity is definitely important, in the sense that spaced repetition scheduling can be more accurate the more regularly you review and the review loads won't get out of whack from studying a lot and then a little, and also in the sense that it's easier to stay on the wagon if you have a routine. Other than that, though, lots of little chunks throughout the day would probably do better than one big chunk per day, and sleeping in between reviews is going to help a lot. Hard to maintain lots of little reviews, though.

It'll be interesting to do some data analysis, once we get the export going. Yum!

Yeah. Made it, too... but only the list for Integrated Chinese II. It was more a revision for me, it took 11 hours, 1150 characters added, 1108 learned, with 2031 reviews.

Interesting here is to see, how weak I am with the tones:
Added Learned # Reviews
Words 1011 1004 1383
Characters 1150 1108 2031
Tones 1138 1089 4992 (damn!)

And I fully agree to ZachH, being honest is important. Sometimes I get the character right, because skritter prompts a line here and there, but I would then mark it wrong if I felt I couldn't do it without help.

On the other hand, I do feel quite comfortable with learning the tones for a character "freely", without having it connected in a word. Yet, my first Chinese teacher told me, tones are not that important, argh, and now, 5 years later, I suffer from that bad advice, because I finally realized that not paying attention to the tones just kills you.

Anyway, I am hoping for the selfmade input function soon, so I can continue skrittering with my own vocab.

ZacH
> 1. Remember the character tone as part of a word, e.g. remember 容易 as 2-4. Otherwise it gets really confusing when you know ten other "rongs" and "yis", trust me.


This seems like a very good advice. What would be a good way to remember the tones?

I repeat the word 'aloud' in my mind a few times and this helps me remember the tones. But this may not be as helpful to beginners.

Learning correct tones is important even if you can't recognize them, if you know 钱 is 2nd, then every time you hear the word spoken it reinforce what a 2nd tone should sound like.

I don't think there is an easy way to remember tones or pinyin, but it gets naturally easier. Strange as it seems characters with the same pinyin tend to have the same tones. For instance, 90% of 'rong' characters are second tone, and similar looking characters tend to have the same pinyin. 廊, 郎, 朗, 榔 - all lang (most second tone).

Learning to put tones to use in the hard part, I was never able to find a good training technique specifically for tones and I still struggle with them. My tones naturally got better from listening more.

The 'learning tones are not important' thing --

1) When you're talking to a Beijing taxi driver, you find that tones for very common words are less prominent in normal speech than the books or CCTV news presenters would suggest. But that doesn't mean you can avoid learning them.

2) However, as most philosophers would say, 'knowing that' and 'knowing how' are fairly unrelated -- knowing that a character takes a tone is one thing, knowing how to say it without thinking about it is another. (Remember that 95% of Chinese won't immediately know what tones words take until you make them think about it, and that you probably can't explain many rules of English grammar.) 'Knowing that' does help some people but I find I just can't think about tones and vocab at the same time in that way. The tone just has to come built-in to the word, and for that, copying other people and getting corrected repeatedly helps more.


Relatedly, one thing that's difficult to learn when you get to upper-intemediate Japanese is that multi-character words actually have one of a number of stress/pitch patterns -- hardly any books bother to mention this fact and you'll never see it on a JLPT exam but it can hinder comprehension in the same way that tones do in Chinese (only a bit less often). The easily-heard but generally benign and trouble-free example is 'hashi' which can mean bridge, chopsticks or edge depending on the pitch pattern, but it becomes more important when you're using e.g. abstract terminology that can't be guessed easily. What I learned of that I had to learn through copying too, not that I'm much good at it.

James