Hello again,
I've not been skrittering for a couple of months, and I wondered whether I would have forgotten all the characters.
I've been pleasantly surprised by how many I still know, and even more that come back after a reminder or two.
Of course, some could be Greek, expecially the most recent ones, but in general it's very encouraging.
Thanks again Skritter gurus.
Rachael.

That's great to hear. Whenever I take a break I feel a little overwhelmed by the number of due items but it's very satisfying to remember something you haven't seen in more than a month.

Were you studying during your time away? That helps to reinforce things.

James

After using the system for about 2 months now I am amazed that remembering these characters is so much easier than before. Now I start to relax more about long queues of characters waiting for me and I don't mind if I seem to have forgotten one. Actually, one of the reasons I prefer the new interface over the old one is that it allows me to mark a character as 'so-so' when I feel I guess-remembered it more than really remembered it. See what I mean? I know then that it will come up shortly and that in this way I will get it eventually. I am still totally hooked. Aiming for 1.500 characters by New Year :-D

All this is good to hear! Last month I saw 盛 for the first time in 8 months (and I really hadn't ever seen it outside of Skritter), and I remembered it easily. So proud!

We're still struggling with ways to make big review piles seem less like "piles of backlog to get through" and more like "really efficient learning opportunities". Review is really where it's at in terms of knowledge gained per time spent, especially if you've got lots of overdue stuff, but it feels like this big task. If we could reframe things such that the more stuff you had due, the more excited you were because the more productive the study would be, that would help a lot. Not sure how to do that, though.

I wonder if a time estimate would make it easier (e.g. "you have approximately 32 minutes of review due now and 17 minutes of review due within the next three days). Maybe the review could disappear altogether or be qualitative (1-100% of today's review done).

Big review piles is just a psychological thing really. If you have been away from it for a while as I have for a few weeks it can seem daunting. Mine was 800+ or so and it took me several days to clear. The trick is not to panic about it I guess. Of course, during that period no new words were added. But that is perfectly ok, adding new words when so many are screaming to be reviewed would be silly anyway. So IMO explaining the system well may help a lot.