I know the discrepancy between Skritter time and real time has been discussed, but I'd like to revisit this issue. I believe that Skritter time should be eliminated and the clock should count real time.

Like many users, I set a daily goal of a definite amount of time studying. (This is in no small part because the review bar is hopelessly broken--as far as I can tell, it's impossible to get to zero reviews due, so using that as a goal would just be masochistic.) In an effort to meet that goal, I very often find myself rushing through reviews I was wrong or so-so on rather than drilling down, rewriting the character, visualizing mnemonics, and reading example sentences. Perversely, I probably end up spending more time learning the character in the long run than if I had spent the extra few seconds then. Intellectually I know I'm only cheating myself when I move on past a shaky character to keep the clock running, but that seems like the natural psychological response.

Furthermore, even if I did have the psychological discipline to drill down on every character for as long as it takes, the current Skritter clock would make it impossible to stick to a consistent study regime when doing that. (Well, not impossible; I suppose I could look at my watch at the beginning of a session and stop when I've reached an hour of real time, but that gets difficult when I'd have to keep track of multiple sessions, at home and at work. Besides, keeping track of time like that is a textbook problem that's hard for a human but easy for a computer. The website should be doing this for me.)

It simply makes no sense to me that the types of activities I mentioned are treated by Skritter as if they had no value. This should be changed, and (accepting Nick's invitation to vigorous debate about "where you wish we'd spend our development efforts") I think it should be a priority. At the very least, there should be an option to display a real-time clock with the amount of real time spent skrittering that day. Fixing this will become even more crucial when the example sentence system is overhauled, as I expect to want to devote more time to reading example sentences then, and that time should be counted.

Postscript: Upon being referred to the FAQ on this subject by the Professor, I see that "We plan to improve the AFK tracking at some point, so that it's smarter about when you are and aren't studying. When we do this, we'll also try out a mode where it keeps counting for a few seconds after you answer each prompt (though not too long)." This is, frankly, even more baffling. Once the AFK tracking is improved, Skritter should know whether I'm away from the keyboard. If I'm not, the clock should be running. I don't see why it would count only for "a few seconds after" I answer but "not too long." If it knows I'm at the keyboard, that time should be counted. Anything else seems like the software trying to make what I think is an inappropriate qualitative assessment of the value of time spent on core study versus peripheral activities like example sentences or mnemonics.

Please discuss. I'm particularly interested if anyone sees value in keeping track of "skritter time" as it is currently understood. I can't see a reason why I would want to keep track of just the time spent trying to think of the answers to the exclusion of keeping track of total time spent studying.

I like the system as is. When I use my computer I multi-task, sometimes taking breaks for 30 minutes to read news online. I don't want that counted as study time. I also do the extra things that you do, such as drilling down on a character even after the clock is stopped. I've figured that an hour of my real study time equals about 40 minutes Skritter study time.

By the way, it is possible to get to 0 reviews due. When you are reviewing an item, look to see the percentage due. When you start hitting 99%, you are less than 0 due.

I often get 0 reviews.

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I have it so Skritter pauses adding new vocabulary at the end of a section and for long vocabulary lists I will sometimes do a manual pause. I also increase the retention rate of learned vocab so Skritter will wait longer before giving me new vocab to study.

I like to go slow but steady. I am very hard on grading myself if I remember how to write a kanji but forget its mnemonic then I mark it as wrong. If I remember how to write the kanji from the mnemonic but I can't picture it in my head (does the primitive go on the top or to the left) before writing it I mark it as wrong. I'm not competing with anyone but myself. My goal is not a certain number of vocab learned a day but rather to just keep studying everyday. I haven't even set a specific goal of hours to study a day I just try to see how much I can study while on the train and in the car before I succumb to my motion sickness and stop.

I personally clear most reviews within the 30 second maximum they can add to "Skritter Time", so for me the discrepancy is negligible.

Also, getting to zero reviews is possible, but in general I aim to get below 30 or so during each session. Once you've done this a few days in a row it ends up being the case that it takes only a few minutes to get back down to "under 30"; I end up Skritter'ing for 5 minutes 3-4 times per day.

I personally love the current setting. If anything having an option to do either would be okay. As is, I know how long I spent actually "thinking" aboutt a word, not just re viewing it.

I do see you point but idont want to lose a system that's worked for me since may.

The problem with showing real time permanently, is that then nobody will every know their skritter time - you can't calculate that yourself. So for the people who like skritter time (myself included) you take that away from us.

Real time though you can easily do without skritter. Your skrittering on a computer which is showing you real time permanently. Simply glance at a different part of the screen :P

So having skritter show real time (despite the technical difficulties already discussed) simply removes the option for people who LIKE skritter time. While leaving it as only skritter time still lets you track real time yourself very very easily.

As long as you study the same way (I personally stop a lot and re-write mistakes for ages), your skritter time will usually have the same "error" as real time. So it's no less accurate for tracking. I know if I study for 25m skritter its 30m real time normally. But it does give me the ability to walk away, or chat to people or anything else without worrying my study time is going to list 5 hours when I really only did 10 minutes and just left the page open.

So for me, it keeps it much more honest. And if I care about the real time its easy to just add 10m to every hour of skritter time to get a pretty accurate value. If it was tracking real time, I know for sure I'd try to mess with it and cheat to make it look good. I'm one of those people who tries to game the system, and skritter time makes that impossible. And I love them for it!

@malaili2

I agree. I'm fine with the system as is, but if there is going to be an extra feature added, I'd prefer to have a toggle to see "Reviews Completed Today" [perhaps only counting successful reviews] in the place of Skritter-time, as opposed to some real-time counter. Nice idea.

Huh. I must say I'm surprised that so many people are so fond of skritter time, which always rubbed me wrong. I do see the points that have been made, though.

Somewhat tangentially, how are those of you that get to zero reviews doing it? For me, whenever I get down to about 40, skritter starts showing me progressively more and more reviews that are 99, 98, 97 percent due, rather than just giving me the ones that are remaining. There doesn't seem to be a way to coax it to show me the ones it thinks are due; it just keeps smugly insisting "I know you've got 17 left to do, but I'm not going to let you do them; here, do these instead." It's maddening; that's why I trained myself to ignore the review bar and focus on the time for my daily benchmark. But then for the reasons I originally said, an hour of skritter time is not a consistent measure day to day, depending on how much real time I spend on peripheral activities.

Of course, people are probably right, skritter time probably does differ from real time by a fairly consistent amount, but sue me, I have one of those anal-retentive minds that get bent out of shape by even statistically insignificant deviation. Nothing makes me happier than opening my progress page and seeing a perfectly straight line of bar graphs for the past seven days with EXACTLY 61 minutes(don't ask) spent every day. Not that I have the time to do that much anymore...

I like the idea of a "reviews completed today" feature; that would give a concrete benchmark to weirdos like me.

You can go down to 0 reviews, you just have to do the 99% too. Keep in mind, that you will have to do the 99% anyway in a few seconds or minutes (that's why they are 99%) and would pop up as to-do, just after you closed the window. The reason, skritter is giving you those is the algorithm which does not give you necessarily the item in the lines of due, but considers as well other factors, as for example when you did the item the last time. Consider the situation, in which you just did a new item and it from the moment you did it, it has a due of 20 seconds. If skritter where to go by due only, it would probably show you this item again right away. But skritter is smarter than that and first gives you a couple of other items in between. Now extrapolate that example and you get the idea. That is at least how I understand the algorithm. Correct me if I am wrong.

By the way: I go down to 0 and take the 99% with me. That way I know, I will not have to skritter in the next 10 minutes again and can rest my conscience a little longer ;-).

Going down to 0 reviews is not a big issue for me but maybe we are talking 2 different things here. I feel on a certain moment during the day, it is relatively easy to clear the reviews due at that moment (provided we are talking reasonable numbers) and go to zero reviews. Like mentioned before you just study a few that are 99% due and then you get there. But it is much harder to clear all the reviews due for a certain day - because these are spread out over 24 hours. I have noticed that for me in Shanghai a new day starts at 4 am. Then my counter for the day is reset to zero. So if you stop reviewing let's say at 8 pm then it much more difficult to get to zero because there there is still 8 hours of review left. Most days i try to clear my queue but i know that at night, when i call it quits, i usually still have 80-100 left. So i take that as my 'zero'. Because of this Skritter time for me is not important. I try to get the work of the day done. I can undertand some people are trying to make goals for themselves and studying a certain amount of time is definitely worthwhile but personally i believe more in result oriented goals.

Getting down to 0 reviews in the blue bar will be different depending on the composition of words in My Words--so everyone's account will be different regarding whether you can easily hit 0. The bar has a lot of bugs. The whole client-side scheduling architecture needs to be totally rewritten in order to be accurate. That's a big project for later.

其实，能够有个目标，一个我们能够达到的目标，对学习挺有帮助的。我很盼望创始人有一天可以加上这样的一个功能。我很烦所剩下要复习词的数量从来不能降为零，真是给人一种失败的感觉。不管你再努力，你也不能完成任务。好像一场无法打赢的战。时间长了就会让人失去兴趣的。

@dbkluck - It's probably easiest to just look at the clock. If you really need that consistent bar graph, log your time studied in Excel every day :D

@DaXia - Considering that it would be a fairly big project for the Skritter gods to make the reviews due indicator hit zero more consistently, my suggestion is that most people would be better off simply regarding sub-100% reviews as zero, rather than striving for that vanity number. Of course, it's harder for some people to make that mental shift than others; they just won't let 2+2 into their houses unless it's going to equal 4. Nevertheless, for most of us, I think the 99% = 0 paradigm should be sufficient.

Not sure if you guys have tried this, but I often that when I get to low review numbers and skritter just isn't giving me that last handful of items if I just refresh the page then I'll get the last few straight away.

Likely to simplistic a cure for some of the problems people are having, but worth trying!

Back on to Skritter time Vs. real time…

I personaly prefer Skritter time. There are endless ways to log and monitor the time one spends learning Chinese, but Skritter time provides a unique metric that is not available or trackable in any other way. I multi-task Skritter with other things (work, other language resources, rest room breaks etc!) and I like that I can leave it running without messing up my stats completely.

A stop/start button on the clock would not be an option for me, it’s just one more thing to forget: Imagine a scenario when rushing to complete one's reviews before leaving for work, one was to forget to close the Skritter program and the timer continued to count regardless... day, month and even year statistics would be skewed due to this one lapse in concentration.

Skritter time gets my vote.