Hello there,

I have a very low retention rate (76% these days), which could be explained by my irregularity in the past few days, but then, even when I was very regular my retention rate was around 86-7%. How come? Could it be because some lists have the same characters (for example now I'm doing both hsk 1 and new Chinese practical reader), and that would mess up the kitten? But then logically my retention rate should be higher than 90%, cuz I'd see the characters more often than I'd need...

Hello,

I have the same remark, I have a very low retention these days. But I'll put this on the "doombug" fault !

What's the "doombug" ?

Yes, I also have this problem! Retention rate of 68%...

Well, the golden ages seem to have past...I'm at a 78% rate (and only after having had a long repetition of tons of characters which I have known for a long time)...

OK, how do you guys get up to 78 per cent retention rate?

whenever you fall below 75%, get out a hammer and the computer will get the hint :)

i'm not sure what the correct answer is there, because there could be a lot of factors playing a role. my guess, however is that doing it every day helps...that being said, I often only have time for 15-30 minutes which often only lets me review old characters and seldom lets me get new ones....so maybe that retention rate is only have the truth and you can still have a look at how many new characters you're getting hold of.

incidentally, how long do you guys normally skritter?

David

@Elie : The doombug is the reaload error that some of us are having these days.

@BFMZ : I usally use Skritter between 1 and 2h per day. But since few days and because of the bug, I skrit less than 30 mins (that's maybe why I have a so low retention rate)

Or it's maybe because we now have to review and remember a lot of chars !

one to two hours...I wonder I have been doing with my time ;)

Do you guys think it is because the stats are being calculated wrong now, or because you're actually getting correct only 75% of review prompts (for characters that are longer than like 12 hour scheduled intervals)?

I'm appealing to Google for help with the doombug. Your experience to the contrary, Tortue, other indicators all point to it only happening on skritter.com and not skrit.appspot.com. (I'm thinking that some other bug is causing hangs some of the time for you).

I don't think it's calculating wrong, I think we're getting characters we shouldn't, and that messes up the memorization process.
Also we're probably not studying under ideal conditions (I usually skritter only once a day, and cram, whereas ideally we should skritter 2-3 times a day, if I understand the theory correctly).

@Baifameizhong: I usually skritter between 30min and 1h, depending on how busy a day I had and/or motivation.

Whether the stat is not calculating correctly I couldn't say as I don't really check it out that often.

The few times I did check it out, I got the impression that it always depends on which characters are being tested (big surprise:). I have one group of Chinese radicals where I couldn't care less about the tones. They all are very similar and I hardly ever get them right (and it doesn't help that they each time show up all together)...anyway, I have just had such a run and my stat is down from 78% to 72%.
I also have the feeling that each time after a whole bunch of new characters is introduced it drops down because I really have to write and see them a couple of time until I get some of them right....but they probably aren't scheduled at longer than 12 hour intervals yet.

@Nick : I don't have any reaload bug (either on skritter or skrit.app) since last night

Are you guys looking at the "weeks" statistics? My retention rate is at 93.1% Is this normal?

that's pretty flash ^^ and yes I'm talking about the week stats (I think over the year I'm around 86 now).
@Baifameizhong: I just decided I wouldn't bother anymore with those characters that I know I know ( :S), or with the radicals I don't care much for, so I just pass them when they appear. That should get your stats up and save you some time :)

Things went downhill a bit for me (~80%) a couple of weeks ago, when there was that major update to the site. I was getting no new words and loads of radicals, the tones of which I couldn't for the life of me remember.

Things have picked back up now, and I'm on 86% for the week. This is from one or two sessions a day, total time ~40 minutes on average.

I've had no retention rate problems. My rate has been pretty steady at around 97%--lest anyone think I'm a freak (for the wrong reasons), that rate is because probably 90% of the characters I've had on Skritter so far have been review for me. I've 'learned' about 1600 characters to date, but mainly this has been a long review process, making sure I can write characters that I have been reading for several years. I made the decision to try and get an overall read on how many characters I've learned over five years. It looks good for the stats, but I'm probably not doing anywhere near the real learning that those with much lower rates are doing.