I am looking for some advice on retention rates - I've recently reduced my retention rate from 95 to 90% originally in order to shift a review pile of 2000+ that was de motivating me (weeks without Skritter).

My motivation returned after a couple of seriously heavy sessions and now the good old Skritter-addiction is back (30 mins to 1 hour Skritter time per day!)

I'm loving the speed with which I am adding new words (still slow adding but I rattle through the 100 or so reviews each day in what feels like 10 seconds) - it's incredable and really motivating - but I have some concerns...

I speak good Chinese (used for work and day to day life in Shanghai) and I usually only add words I know how to use (in speech) however I have noticed that some definitions and words escape me when I see them 'in the wild' I look at them and say "I'm pretty sure I know that word/character but it's just slipped to the back of my mind" this really isn't that often, but at 95% this never really happened... I then get an old word coming up for review after a week or so and sometimes I'm stumped (again only around 10%% of the time)

My worry is, with the brutal number of new words (not really new - about 1 in 20 are really new to me - those I add from a Chinese Graded Reader series) and the lower retention rate, am I heading to a crash and burn situation? I've read some stuff about lower retention rates sometimes helping with long term memory, is this a myth?

Wow, long post, my apologies... I'm just on a Skritter high and don't want to be blind-sided by a Skritter hangover when/if the bubble bursts!

Any advice or musings on the whole retention rate gig would be most interesting for me.

Adding words you generally know how to use is definitely a good thing - a big benefit for retention and ease of Skrittering. You don't get bogged down.

If it's a word you don't know much, having a flashcard example sentence or two will also help a huge amount.

As for changing the retention rate, I did the same as you. From 95-90%. I haven't noticed that I'm forgetting any significant amount more, but I am getting more manageable review numbers, while continuing to add a steady number of words.

I also haven't seen any evidence of this bubble bursting! The important thing for me is to have words in Skritter you are familiar with (for me, flashcard sentences), and that can be recalled quickly (a good custom definition - in my case, with the aforementioned sentences, and with pictures).

There will always be words that you forget in the wild. When they come back round on Skritter, I just mark them wrong, and hopefully it will get ingrained better the second time round.

Retention rates are subject to the law of diminishing returns - a higher rate takes significantly more work to achieve while giving only marginally better results than a lower rate.

However, when you study at lower rates, it's easier to be overwhelmed by the volume of new material that comes your way. If your mind can handle juggling a greater amount of new material you should be fine, but if you're the type to focus on one thing at a time you might have a hard time with that.

Common sense would dictate that higher retention rates are more slow and steady while lower rates are fast and sloppy. Personally, since I typically get quite a bit of exposure to Chinese, I prefer fast and sloppy because where I fall short on Skritter I can make up in other situations, but the downside is that sometimes it takes extra work to make it up, and if my Chinese exposure is low for a period, I lose a lot of my real-life review opportunities.

One thing I do wonder about is Skritter's SRS - lets say there is a word that Skritter drills me on when I add it as I am very harsh with myself and will mark a character as wrong if I don't immediatly remember how to write it or I get one stroke a little off etc. It then comes back with diminishing requency untill I really get it and it gets scheduled out for 8 days or 2 weeks time. After two weeks it comes up and I get it wrong: what happens? If this keeps happening (correct reviews until 2 weeks out then wrong) will Skritter learn and make those 2 week reviews a little sooner for all my words?

@Byzanti: Thank you for the advice, it's good to hear that others are using a 90% rate and finding it works for them too, it's great adding 100+ words and 100+ characters per week - I know that this will slow down once I've added all the words I can use in spoken Chinese but until that time the progress is crazy fast!

I started Skritter using the radical list and then HSK 1 thru 3 as I wanted to get a grounding in the characters and get usable words as quick as possible. I had no real problem (small enough number of radicals to drill meanings into my head and I knew how to speak and use 99% of HSK 1-3). It was when I started on HSK 4 list and a few 'new' words started coming up that I decided to overhaul my system - I had these Graded readers that use the first 2000 and 3000 words of Chinese (old HSK) and drill their usage, I now only add words that I come across in these as well as those that I see on a day to day basis and know well but can't read/write.

@Fatdragon: I'm in the same boat as you - living and working in China and thus using the language everyday - when I study something new I can ask my girlfriend/friend/colleague and get a ton of example sentences straight away. Also I notice the new words I learn almost immediately as I will hear it in a conversation or a colleague will use it in a sentence every day.

As for the two weeks getting a little sooner - Nick has said something like that in the past. What he said was, for example, if you keep marking something so-so, and then you keep getting it wrong when it next comes up, the time between the so-sos will decrease a bit. So I think there is this kind of consideration in scheduling, but perhaps not on the per word level.

--- My worry is, with the brutal number of new words ... and the lower retention rate, am I heading to a crash and burn situation?

No. Lower retention rate will mean that you are less likely to crash and burn (having a big review queue). You will just forget more often, and if that isn't unpleasant, it'll actually be more efficient for you.

--- After two weeks it comes up and I get it wrong: what happens?

Skritter will adjust scheduling for all items of the same part (writing, reading, etc.) in between five hours and eight days when you get items in those class right and wrong until you're hitting your target forgetting index (a retention rate of 95% is a forgetting index of about 90%), or you min/max out. So if you get 9 of them right and 1 wrong, it won't do anything, but if you get 6 right and 4 wrong, it'll be slightly lowering your interval multipliers for that category until you are hitting 90%.

If it's longer than eight days, it goes into the next category of scheduling.