Hi to all,

After a couple of years using Skritter on my iPad (and passing HSK 3 in some way thanks to it), I am now preparing HSK 4 and I have found a situation in which I would appreciate your opinion/ideas...

I have already studied the four "official" lists of HSK (from 1 to 4) and they are all already in the "review" mode, but... I would like to "go back" somehow and make a complete review of everything, just to be sure that focusing on the HSK 4 words has not made me forget how to write some HSK 2 word, for example.

The problem is that if I do not do anything at all, most of the words that are offered for review always come from the HSK 4 list, so I guess I should do any of the following:
- Skip sections and focus on one or two.
- Ban words from each section (those I definitely know and do not want to review)
- Remix one list and ban/skip words/sections.
- Create a new "list" with those words I would like to focus
- Any other?

Which one would be your recommendation for such practice? Right now I am "banning" words from my study lists, but it is a very tedious process.

Thanks,
Fernando

First of all, the fact that the old words don't come up indicates that Skritter thinks you know those words pretty well. After all, you've been studying for years and HSK 1-3 are relatively basic.

Secondly, on the iPad you can use Advanced Study to study only HSK 1 (or 2 or 3). Then Skritter will look at the words on those lists and find the ones it thinks you should study, but you won't get a comprehensive end-to-end test of every word.

Thirdly, your whole procedure (banning words one by one) sounds like it's totally not a good use of your time.

If you really want to test every word once to find out what you've forgotten, I'd dump the word lists into another application (like Pleco) that will let you do a massive test.

However, I think striving for 100% recall is not worth it in the long run.

I faced a similar situation when preparing for the HSK 5. In the end, I decided to go through the spreadsheet I had of all the HSK vocab from levels 1-5 and highlight any I struggled with. I then created two review lists (I think I had too many items for one list) on Skritter. This worked really well for me and was worth the extra effort.

Thanks for your suggestions. Since banning was not worthy, I changed my approach and started studyng list by list in "Advance Mode", "starring" those characters where I found some issue (tipically when trying to remember the initial stroke of the hanzi).

As I expected, I faced no issue with HSK1, only one or two hanzi in HSK2, and a few more in HSK3, but much more in HSK4.

Once that I am done, I will start a review for ALL the lists putting 100% of weight on the "starred elements", which supposedly will bring over and over those that required my attention.

The option to review externally with a spreadsheet and create a review list is not bad as well. Probably I will follow that approach in my "final round".

Thanks again,
Fernando