I was wondering what method of study you use, while using skritter.

Some of you wrote that you write the character a couple of times, do you mean you check the phantom and then write it a few times consecutively or you write it once, pass on to the next character and write it a few times because after a few reviews you know it and it will stop returning? Before i always accepted my not knowing it, just wrote it once following the phantom and waiting for next time but lately I have been experimenting with writing characters i didn't know or made some mistake on, a few times more on the same review I doubt if it makes any difference for me, it seems my immediate memory and my long term memory have no troubles but my short term memory is the extremely weak point in the whole process (and in daily life and no i am not old).

also, do you guys do one list at a time or have a few at the same time on add&review? I started out with one when i started with skritter, found it boring and added others. Now i switch between review, add and review and disable of one or more lists, based on my feeling on that day.

It seems that my number of reviews are immense every day. Sometimes because i didn't practice in a few days, sometimes just because the more you study the more reviewing is bound to occur. I don't seem to progress anymore since all i am doing is reviewing my mistakes and known characters up for reviewing. This, together with the technical issues that i am experiencing with skritter lately, is very bad for my motivation. Would you recommend going back to practicing only one list or is the review load just big because of the amount of known characters, that all will be back up for review at one time or another. My retention rate is usually around the optimal (or that is what i read) value of 90 percent.

Last question, sorry long post. Like I said, I have been doomed with a very bad short term memory. Unfortunately things pass here before going to the long term memory. In school and whenever i needed my memory i relied on other methods and parts of my brain to go around this problem. I have never scored well on tests that rely solely on memory. I know you have mnemonics and other aids for your memory and although i do agree i does make it easier to remember rather than remembering strokes or components or whatever, it doesn't make much of a difference when the amount of characters is so big i think. Besides doesn't everybody use some kind of remembering trick, i can't believe anybody can remember loads of raw data without some kind of a method. Anyway, developing team, since you are creating this wonderous tool, you must have done some research on memory related topics, could you link me to some interesting information about memory and how to make as efficiently use of it as possible?

again sorry for the absurd length of this post, just very frustrated, among other things because of a drop in progress. I need to do something about it or i will kill my chinese friends :) they are good friends but bad teachers

For short-term memory, mnemonics make a huge difference for me and everyone I know. If I'm not getting a character, checking the character decomposition and making a story is the way to go. Sometimes I get lazy and avoid this step, but it's always a mistake. I'm really looking forward to including support for these character stories, as well as building in character decomposition.

Here's one detailed description of character learning method:
http://www.snigel.nu/?p=972

For inspiration and motivation, I love to read Khatzumoto:
http://www.alljapaneseallthetime.com/blog

The Wired article on spaced repetition:
http://www.wired.com/medtech/health/magazine/16-05/ff_wozniak?currentPage=all

For some original spaced repetition theory, the SuperMemo site has a lot of info. Here's one talking about the measurements for the 90% optimal retention rate (note that our retention rate is their 100% - forgetting index -- they use retention rate for how much you'll remember at a time, which is higher):
http://www.supermemo.com/articles/theory.htm

I'm not sure how fast you're writing with Skritter, but it's worth trying to get that speed up. I know there are several strokes that recognize poorly and throw kinks in things; I'm desperate to get some time to tweak them. Sometimes there's tons of lag, and then there's not much to do except try at a different time. But generally, once you've actively recalled a character, if you're sure you know it, there isn't much point to finishing writing it -- just skip past it. (If the border is green, then Skritter thinks you're right. Only if it turns red/blue will it count you wrong. So just hit "next" at any point if you're sure you know something.)

Another thing to try is not missing days. If something you studied two months ago is scheduled for Tuesday, and you don't study until Thursday, it'll probably be fine. But if something you just learned on Sunday or Monday is scheduled for Tuesday, even though you were starting to have it in medium-term memory, waiting until Thursday has a good chance of killing it. Additionally, each sleep cycle that has characters percolating is going to be valuable.

I know it can be hard to not miss days, especially now when Skritter sometimes throws up debilitating lag when you try to practice (we're working on it).

As for lists: I've just been adding from all textbooks at once, but that's only because I'm debugging them through practice. It's satisfying to have a bunch of the easier textbooks adding words in there, because if I get 8 items added at a time, but 6 of them I already know and breeze through in 10 seconds, then I feel smart.

I'm don't know what the optimal number of lists is -- but I would encourage you to focus on learning those words that you're most interested in. With the new update, you'll be able to browse through the lists and add individual words that you think look interesting, or dump your own words into your queue. Until then, just pick the most engaging list. I know there aren't many up now, but there will be 18 soon, not counting themed lists.

Along with that: if certain characters are beating you up and taking a lot of time, just ignore them for a couple weeks or months. They can wait and will be easier later.

As far as review build-up: Scott's improved the scheduling algorithm for the new update, so hopefully it'll work better for you. When everything's working as normal, review buildup (such that you can't quickly get through it and add new words) should only happen after you've missed days or after you added a ton of words the previous day. Adding words will also happen more intelligently, happening throughout the review process and not just all at the end (which will lead to a big bunch the next day). Words that you get wrong during a review also will show up somewhere in the middle, and not at the end. It'll be significantly more efficient for the short-term stuff, I think.

Retention rate: 90% is optimal, theoretically. In practice, we're just taking that number from SuperMemo research. We haven't had the time to do our own analysis yet. When we have more data from user review, we'll be able to determine what's most efficient for this context, and we'll also be able to tune the kitten to provide that.

Also, since the kitten isn't highly tuned yet, it's probable that certain intervals are having higher than 90% and others are having lower than 90% retention. Eventually, it should be more consistent, but there may be areas where you forget too much or too little. Retention rate also doesn't include things that haven't hit a scheduled interval longer than a day yet, so it says nothing about the really short-term performance.

Anyway, to sum up, here's what you can do:
1) take the time to make good mnemonics (at least for hard characters)
2) write swiftly
3) practice every day, as regularly as possible
4) ignore problem items for a while
5) read the theory and try to identify what's happening differently in your experience
6) keep at it while waiting for us to fix stuff, add helpful features, and make Skritter way more efficient

Sorry to hear things are frustrating you. This is still beta software, and I think we can squeeze 2-3x more learning efficiency from it before we're done. And that'll translate to a huge difference in how much you have to review vs. how much time you can spend learning new stuff.

Thanks for the info, it's helpful for sure.

what do you mean with write more swiftly? You mean write faster and don't care about strokes that weren't recognised?

And i use mnemonics, like I said i think everybody, and for sure me with my bad memory during my whole life, have some tricks to remember more easily, but you still have to remember the tricks you teach yourself. So when you have one hundred new characters in one day, when you are on a roll, you also have to remember all these tricks. Maybe i don't explain myself too clearly but that's the way it makes me feel. But i am sure i have some stories for most of the characters. Usually the problem is that after learning more i finally realize that this or that character is built up of some components i already know but i didn't notice it and then these stories seem to get in the way of just remembering the more logical way.

What would help for me is more use for the characters learned i.e. sentences and more multiple character words in stead of learning single characters of which most chinese will tell you "this has no meaning".

It is frustrating not because of your software, except for the lag and sometimes the bad recognition. Lately i have been learning so much, in my school and on my own or even just in my daily life since i live and work in china and i still seem not to be able to make use of the things i learn. I even still stand firmly behind my opinion that chinese is a much easier language than any i had to learn before, inlcuding my mothertongue, it just takes so much time to have enough basic knowledge to implement it and to improve your day to day communication. For example today i had four or five instances of the pinyin 'xu', things like this make it impossible to learn, not because of faults in the software or in my method, just because they come at once and overload my memory. Some linguist once gave some meaning to this character but this doesn't help you to evolve since it does have this meaning (more or less) but only in combination with some other character.

Also this language is the first thing i have ever come across that really challenges me to an extent that it drives me crazy. I am a fast learner and i use a lot of ways to try to learn faster in whatever i do. It just seems that how much you learn and remember it is never enough. I honestly have never had this feeling before in anything that i learned before that i was ever interested in. This is why i said i want to kill my friends because i know i try so hard and i learn a lot and very fast lately because of big effort, but it don't seem to improve my practical skills.

Well i guess i have to bear with it and have more patience. You are right about daily practice, but it is not easy if you have some job to do at the same time. And i should find a way to improve my memory because it is troubling me even in my daily life, but i am afraid biology is not to be defeated.

thanks for the info

peace

steven

also i have just now noticed that the border of the square in which you write has a colour. I up until now only noticed the border on the characters themselves. Maybe you could make this border on the square bigger. Except for a bad memory nature also gave me partial colour blindness and this green thing is almost impossible to see for me let alone i can distinguish it from the red or blue whatever it is you use for wrong answers. The border on characters is just big enough for me.

Swift writing: yeah, I mean, the point of writing it is to actively remember it, not to prove to Skritter that you know it (Skritter assumes you know it until you prove otherwise). So once you've got it in your head, don't let recognition issues slow you down--write it and go on.

We'll have more focus on full words' characters practice with the new version, so that may help.

Eventually, we'll do something clever to alleviate overload of characters that you confuse with each other. I think the new definitions will help, though; they are much better than before.

Other users: how do you feel about the size of the colored border? I didn't want to make it bigger, 'cause it looks tacky, even though it's a useful feedback mechanism. We can experiment with it, though.

I'm red-green colorblind myself, but I guess I'm not colorblind enough to keep myself from committing color usability sins; I figured since I had no problem with it, it was contrasting enough. Perhaps you can send me a different shade of green that would be easier to see?

maybe it also depends on the screen you use and the resolution and whatnot. and anyway i always use the V-mark and X-mark to distinguish so no prob.

and i like to work around problems instead of making everything perfect for everybody.

Sonorier,
You must have bad eyes or a bad screen. The colour is perfectly clear for me.

When I re-write characters I use skritter to write it correctly after viewing, then erase, then write, then erase and then write a final time before moving onto the next character.

I am also red-green colour blind and cannot easily tell the difference between the right and wrong borders.

Sonorier: why don't you have a chance to practise your Chinese living and working in China?

indeed red-green colourblindness makes it very hard and i must say that i just mentioned it because Nick mentioned it and i never ever even saw ANY colour before. I use the V and X mark to distinguish. So ZachH yes it is the eyes but i also don't think that it should be changed per se.

i have a good chance to practice my chinese in China. However speaking is one thing. I understand almost everything that my partners, friends or employees tell me. My tones are still way of but that's just a matter of time. The writing though... They always write cursive which i don't recognise at all and while using skritter and i ask them something or they are commenting on my writing they don't even know the components you know, i have to tell THEM. So for some things i think you need either good teachers, which friends are usually not (neither am I a good english teacher) or some good method for yourself.

I am not doing bad i think but i am too perfectionist and I like to go fast. I am not complaining, i was just frustrated because of my own slowness. Like I said I was never that slow in learning anything. And i don't even think it is difficult, just the massive amount of data you have to suck up...drives me crazy. I like efficiency... hehe

We'll work on improving the right/wrong feedback beyond the colored border.

I think learning to write thousands of Chinese characters is going to take a huge number of hours with Skritter. But at least it'll be possible. 加油!

We've tweaked the correct/incorrect colors to have more contrasting luminosities (darker red, lighter green). Does this help at all? Do we need to push them further apart?

not really being colour blind I don't know what the best way to deal with it would be, but would it make sense to have an option for such a situation where people can pick the correct and false colours of their own choice?

It seems like a superfluous preference. If we are able to (with feedback from users) design it well enough on this end to work for virtually all users, that is better.

am i totally messed up or is the present colour for wrong answers blue?

anyway it seems the new lines are a bit thicker as well which is easier. But like I said the V and X mark suffice for me.

Wrong answers for words you haven't yet gotten right are blue; if you had previously gotten it and now forgotten, it's red. We did that so it'd be a little nicer to you when it's not necessarily expecting you to know something.

With the Genius, we'll probably be able to display what Skritter thinks your chance of remembering each prompt is, and have the color depend on that instead.

Good thread.

Going back to one of sonorier's earlier points,

> So when you have one hundred new characters in one day, when you are on a roll, you also have to remember all these tricks.

For me anyway, trying to get through 100 or so characters in a day would lead to massive overload. The total number of Chinese characters is a FAQ, but many estimates have it in the range of 30K - 40K. Someone learning 100 characters per day would therefore be able to learn the entire set of characters in around one year. I think most people would agree that learning all the 漢字 in a year would be pretty optimistic.

I'd suggest drastically lowering the number of new characters that you're adding to your working set of characters. For me, in my pre-Skritter days, using pencil and paper, 20 to 30 characters per week (yes, week) was about the most that I could cope with. Since I started using Skritter I've been able to handle 50+ characters per week (not counting those I already knew well before starting to use Skritter).

I'd be very happy if I could learn and retain 10 characters per day (plus words using those characters) using Skritter. 100 characters per day definitely seems like a very aggressive goal.

Nick - Your response to the red/blue question should be in the FAQ. I eventually figured this out on my own, but this is not at all obvious to someone who is new to the system.

As a side note, I have to point out that I've never seen a web app where the developers are as actively involved in the support forums as the Skritter developers are here. You guys get huge kudos for your active support efforts. Thank you!

Good point, jpo. We haven't stressed this enough, but adding too many words at once is worse than you might imagine if you're not going to keep up and do a lot of review the next couple days to clear them. Regular practice is a lot more efficient.

I've added that point to the FAQ. I'm excited for when we can get the User's Guide done 'cause there'll be a lot of stuff like this in there.

Thanks for the kudos! This style of support is the natural way of building web apps for those in the know these days:
http://www.paulgraham.com/13sentences.html 4-6
So thank you for helping us build it! I shudder to think what we'd be building now without all the great user feedback over the past eight months.

jpo, you are right 100 a day is too much, maybe i should have wrote 100 characters in a short time in stead of in a day.

I also add very few characters a day, since most of my time goes to reviewing, usually i have a review queue of one to several hundred characters. I am now at 700+ characters and this is only going up very slowly. Although just starting to use skritter it could have been 50 to 100 per study time since i already knew a lot, they were very easy, or the new characters i learned at the same time on my own or at school. Since i have reached my real level on skritter this has changed.

I think Skritter doesn't allow you to add a lot of new characters at a time since the more you know the more you are reviewing. This is why it is such a great tool, it sort of decides for you.

Nick, i understand the colours now, hadn't figured it out on my own, shame shame.