Which is more important, the time you've Skrittered or zeroing on your review count?

I've been almost constantly doing 2 hours per day dosages, but with recent developments in college schedule been finding it hard to negotiate this time frame. So I've been considering reducing the time to one hour per day dosage OR zeroing the review count.

I think trying to hit zero on the review count is a bad goal. To me just Skrittering everyday is the most important thing. My schedule is very sporadic, so even if it's a packed day I want to get at least 10-20 minutes in. When I have more time I do more.

To me the biggest setback is having a day where I don't Skritter at all. When this happens guilt consumes me haha.

Arkan, I have the same problem. Skritter reviews are up to 1000 today...
And I am supposed to add up to 40 new words a day.

So I am doing around one hour skrittering to reduce the piled up reviews and I use another hour to just study single lists in which I add the new vocab!

My personal preference is to zero the review count. I find it's way more efficient to study items when they're near the 100% mark. When the percentage gets too high, I get many wrong and get discouraged. Also, if I've forgotten a lot, then it seems an inefficient use of my earlier study time.

I only add manually. When I feel I'm starting to get overburdened by reviews, I lay off on adding for a while to catch up. There's no point in adding new words if I can't remember my old ones.

I'd rather review items in their nineties, rather than add a slew of new words that will tie me up for a week or more in very late reviews.

ya but what to do when you have university lessons every day and you have to add words every day no matter of how high your review number is?

You're right: my suggestions only apply to students of SkritterU.

Your situation certainly explains your amazing Skritter hours. :)

learninglife j.h., many university Chinese courses assign far more words than can reasonably be learned without massive, massive study. Most of the time, they do this because they unconsciously expect you to forget most of the words anyway. With Skritter, you actually remember almost all the words at any given time, but the professors are expecting you to cram and forget. So you're probably learning a lot more than they intend, but also spending more time than they deserve from you.

One solution would be to skip many of the words that you think aren't actually going to be important later (lots and lots of new vocab are like this). Another is to ban those things right after the first quiz. A third is to lower your retention rate. A fourth is to reduce the number of parts you're doing. A fifth is to decide which you want: solid knowledge of Chinese or good grades on vocab quizzes, and adjust how much you're studying accordingly. A sixth is to just study a lot and get both (and it eventually becomes easy because you know everything).

thank you Nick. I think this is a very good and useful advice which also will be useful for other users who have similar problems.

What I did is put the retention rate down to 89, the lowest.
But I still get around 1200 reviews every day. At the moment I am not adding any new ones ...

That's crazy, I don't understand why your reviews are so much higher than mine j.h. You must be adding way more words than me, as I do similar hours as you. I only have one chinese lesson per week at my university so I don't have the same pressure to add words. Are you studying your complete degree in China or are there for a year?

The retention rate change will take several weeks or more to show any effect, but after a while, it'll be a huge difference in the number of reviews you're getting.

There are 4-month-Chinese-courses at Chinese universities.

During one week you have
speaking,
listening,
reading and
comprehensive Chinese.

Each of these courses have a different textbook.

The new course just started this week and I guess over all I should have learned roughly 100 words.

So far I have added around 60.
I agree with Nick when he says there are words that you dont need to learn but the problem for me is to decide which one are the ones I can ignore.

learninglife j.h., maybe when you prepare your vocab list, you could use a program to help you filter/sort the words based on a frequency list.

If you have a Mac, Byzanti's Chinese Reader http://www.byzanti.co.uk/ might work. If you have a PC or Linux, the Chinese Word Extractor http://www.zhtoolkit.com/apps/chinese_word_extractor/ might help. I haven't really used either of these, though.

learninglife j.h. i have been there too, when i was doing an intensive 4 hrs a day class... then i slowed down for a while so bring my number of reviews down. Now i only add so much words that i can manage the reviews. If my reviews tend to get too high i will put the words in a skritter list but not yet study them. instead i try to learn with pen and paper at least i know them for a test. later when the course is finished i will study them in skritter.

this is some seriously useful advice! thank you all!

I am using beeminder to push myself to hit a minimum number of Skritter-hours per week. Its working okay, but I wonder if a better goal would be to target the number of words learned. The advantage would be that it would push me to focus more on really learning the words instead of logging hours. (similar to the hacking Chinese challenge that some of you are doing). On the other hand, progress in number of words learned might be subject to more random variation (based on lists currently under study, etc.) and is also just an estimate made by Skritter, whereas time spent is more objective. Any thoughts?

Input-based (study X hours) rather than output-based (learn X words) goals are better unless 1) you happen to like sometimes being forced to go extreme to deal with random variation and 2) you are way more motivated by the thought of knowing X words by Y date than just by the thought of making steady progress.

Thanks, Nick. I think I will opt for steady progress. The lesson I have drawn from my experience with beeminder is that motivation is something that has to be managed. Since targeting the input (hours) has worked reasonably well for me, I think it best not to mess with it, at the risk of de-motivating myself by unexpected setbacks.