I think I may have worked out why skritter has become so discouraging at the moment. After a week or so of not being able to study, I have come back and in any 10-15 minute block, half the words I can't remember, which is fine, but the longer I study those words I have forgotten still don't come back. So instead of feeling the satisfaction of re-learning, I just have a continual feeling that I have forgotten everything.

Is there a way to make words you cant remember come back in the same review session?

I think what is happening now is that I might tick 50 words as wrong, then not see them again for another 24 hours, at which point I have forgotten and have to tick them all wrong again.

Are these longer-term or shorter-term words that you forget many of? And are you trying to clear a big review queue, where most of the words you're doing are overdue? I will check the scheduling factors that have been adjusted for you and see whether they make sense given your experience.

One thing that might help with this is for when I change the scheduling to deprioritize hopelessly overdue items so that you get a better mix of ones you can actually save when there's a giant review queue.

Another thing you could do is to practice twice a day, spreading them out a bit, so that the ones you got wrong have more time to mature again (but less than a full day).

Don't worry about it. Really. You didn't really forget all of them. The important thing is the exposure.

One time I took ~ 1 year off from lifting -- I was running instead -- and when I tested myself in my old lifts I realized I lost about 4 years of strength gains. 4 years of progress -- at least in my head -- were gone after one year.

However, after switching back into lifting I was able to get back to my previous level of strength in about 4 months.

The same thing occurs with Skritter. I didn't use Skritter for ~ 1 year and I forgot almost everything. This time around, though, I am learning everything much faster and retaining it quicker with fewer reviews.

@董雅各 : whenever this happened to me in the past I always concentrated on writing (switched off the others) and just tried to clear the queue on writing in 3-4 days. Then after the writing queue was cleared I did tones, then definition.

I recognize what you are saying though, ie forgetting the same words every day because words dont come frequently enough for you to re-learn them. However, if you put in a bit of extra efforts over the course of a few days things will come back to you.

@董雅各 icecream is completely correct. The only problem here is that you are getting frustrated because you're forgetting, but actually forgetting and then re-learning is an extremely helpful technique for solidifying memories. The brain tries to forget things it thinks are unimportant, but a little trace always remains. Then if it is forced to re-learn something which it previously forgot, it starts to realize that that thing actually was important. After a couple of cycles of doing this the memory will be extremely solid.

One issue, though, is that maybe your "unknown item delay", i.e. the delay for items marked wrong, is too long. Mine was too long at first and then it gradually got shortened down to an appropriate level for an old man like me.

Another issue is that maybe you're adding too many new things at once. Maybe you might think about pausing your lists for a while and focusing on reviews of stuff you already know until you don't feel so overwhelmed any more. I also find it very useful to add lots of words and phrases that are mostly or completely made up of characters that I already know in order to reinforce the knowledge of those characters and deepen the understanding of their shades of meaning.

James