Hi everybody,

It's been three months. Skritter says I have 5000 items to review.

http://screencast.com/t/nhlVqScNnlFq

Just wanted to share :-D

I've been working in a high-pressure job in Shanghai and had no time for study. But I have Skritter to thank for my ok reading abilities as I get around in the city. I hope to get back to studying a bit over the holiday break in Taipei. "No pain!"

Joyeux Noël!

k

Oh I hate that, when that happens. And we come to the forums to moan about it and they always cheerfully say "oh but you can ramp it up before and after you leave to make up the review times...!"

I had 3,000 a couple weeks ago, and I knocked it out in 2 days. No joke.

Of course, I was using the app, which made it go a lot faster. Not trying to rub it in :P But once the app is out, if you have a big back log like that, it will be conceivable to go through it a lot faster than it's possible now.

A person can only sit at a desk staring at a screen for so long.

You can pretty easily knock out 1,000 of those in half an hour by doing nothing but pinyin prompts. It's the writing that takes time.

It's the character writings that I do and want! Don't care about the pinyin or anything else!

About to hit 5k myself. No biggy, as I usually focus on specific lists anyway.

@atdlouis and @GrandPooBlah yes that is good advice. I started by restricting myself to the pinyin and definitions, which can be gone through quickly using the keyboard shortcuts. I am almost done reviewing those and should have less than 1500 to go by then. I guess I'll go through the tones next. And the writing last. This is a pretty good way to do a global review.

The only odd thing, to me, is that Skritter stays very positive about my knowledge of characters and my retention rate. Even though I clearly forgot quite a few words and characters, there is little sign of this in my statistics. I guess I have some knowledge of the characters somewhere in my head, but still, I'd be interested (and no doubt depressed) to see what my actual knowledge is, that is, an estimate of how many characters I actually recognize at this time, as opposed to the total number of characters I recognized at any point in the past. But, ok, let's stay positive, I will get those characters back soon!

Yeah, after you learn a word or character, you sometimes have to get it wrong a few times before it counts as "not learned." Raising the retention rate should help with that statistic.

Remember that the number of items due is just psychological; it doesn't really affect anything, so don't let it discourage you.

One thing that I have recently been finding highly motivating is using Anki in its tag study mode. Let's say you are studying items from chapters 1-5 of a book, and after a holiday break you come back to find 300 items due. In Anki you can limit your study (if you've tagged your cards using the chapter numbers) to only Chapter 1 items; naturally there will be many fewer items due and it will be psychologically less daunting to attack a pile of 30 items than a pile of 300 items. Once you get done with Chapter 1's items, you move on to Chapter 2, etc. I always do it starting from the most basic chapters first, on the theory that I should review the basics before I review the more advanced stuff.

This has really changed the way I deal with huge backlogs of due items; in the past I used to get discouraged, while now I use the tags to triage the due items and make the task seem more manageable.

In the Skritter context, you could do something similar by studying just certain lists or just certain sections of those lists. I believe the study page changes the displayed number of items due if you study only one list. You can also study only certain parts (tones, writings, etc.) which will further reduce the displayed number of items due.

James

To those of you with lists numbering in the thousands, I have a couple of questions. First, was Skitter your first foray into learning to read/write or did you have prior experience? Secondly, how long did it take you and with what kind of intensity of study to reach those levels?

I've set myself a modest goal of 1,500 traditional Chinese characters as a New Year resolution, was just wondering how that compared :)

Just to be clear I had 5000 items to review, but only learned 1000 characters and about that many words. It's the magic of Skritter to magnify my small knowledge into a soul-crushing amount to review :-)

To answer your questions anyway: not my first time, I supposedly knew about that many characters 25 years ago, but forgot a lot, so some of what I learned in Skritter was review. It took me about 4 months and 1-2 hours Skrittering a day to get from a residual 200 words and 200 characters to 1000. That's real time studying hours, so about twice as much as what Skritter counts.

And my bit of unsolicited advice to help that resolution come true, from a fun book I just read:

“We don’t remember isolated facts; we remember things in context.”
http://coffeetheory.com/2011/07/08/book-review-moonwalking-with-einstein-by-joshua-foer/

Reviewing my 5000 items, I found a bunch of words and characters that meant little to me, and were correspondingly hard to remember. Over the years, I've had various harebrained schemes to learn characters, like trying to memorize the 1000-character classic
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thousand_Character_Classic
Most of these schemes failed miserably or amusingly. My most long-lasting successes learning characters are from when I was modestly enrolled in fun, stimulating, inherently multi-media beginner-level classes and learning elementary, basic, useful daily-life stuff.

Just came back to a similar load after vacation - 5500+ reviews due! Spread 'em out over the next 20 days - I know its not ideal for the timing, but I can't stand finishing a day with more than a dozen reviews pending and planned on, you know, catching up with other things from my holidays this week too :)

After a couple of months of pretty sporadic practice I ended up with a persistent 2000 reviews due. It didn't bother me but it felt like I couldn't really make progress and I couldn't really learn (or focus on learning)the nagging dozens that kept coming up, especially the tones. I was stuck around that 2000 mark.

So I did what others have recommended for getting the number reduced down to a comfortable level: reviewing parts. Sure enough, the number is now below 1000 but, even better, when I was doing tones-only I actually learned those tones. Ahah, success! I think because I was focusing on one aspect I paid attention (listened, pronounced and learned) instead of just trying to get through them.

Even though I know it'll still take a while to do all the writing practice, I am encouraged to have a smaller number looming and even more pleased with knowing I've learned some of those miserable tones in getting there. Here's an amen for reviewing parts!

Similar to atdlouis: I had around 2500 reviews pending when I was invited into the iOS beta (down from 5000 two weeks prior!) and managed to clear them down to zero within 2-3 days. Things go very quickly using a stylus on the app, and even better it doesn't feel like a chore to squeeze in 5 minutes of Skritter here and there all throughout the day.