Hey everyone! I'm back to skrittering after a 5 month break. The ~3000 item backlog doesn't bother me that much, but I'm a bit concerned about the "bonus" added to my character intervals when I answer correctly.

For example, I might get a review on the definition of a word that I haven't seen in 5 months and is way overdue. The next day I'm asked for the definition on one of the characters. Of course my recollection will be aided by the fact that I saw the character the day before. Still, if I answer correctly, my interval will be much longer than before, due to the review being so much overdue! The same holds for first writing a character and then being asked for the pinyin shortly after, etc.

I'm worried that when I have cleared my backlog, my review queue will basically be divided into two groups: One where the items have a short interval, and one where the interval is very long. I'm thinking that the scale of the difference between these two groups may not be in proportion to the difference in my ability to recollect, because of the reasons I outlined above.

Is there a way to decrease or turn off this "overdue bonus"?

I have also considered starting over, but it seems to me that in the end this will require a lot more work since I will have to test each item at least a few times before the intervals get back at the same level.

Any thoughts or suggestions would be very much appreciated! :-)

I have a related problem every time I add a new word. If I add a new word today and see one part, then tomorrow I'll still remember the other "new" parts and they'll be scheduled for much longer than they ought to be.

Because of this I have decided that I want to see the definition prompt first, but it is inconvenient to always be switching settings.

I faced a similar issue, and casually observe the following. I worked through my 3700 review backlog, and a portion of it was highly repetitive. As it turned out, sometimes I would miss characters that were parts of words that I would normally recall correctly. Long story short, it felt like it balanced out. Missing words containing recognized characters seemed to stimulate the stand alone character to bubble up for review. I hold out that I could be wrong, but perhaps also at play is that Skritter thinks I know around 1200 characters at the moment, and I am actively discovering new words that use some of them, so it does not really matter if certain characters come up or not individually. Some permutation of a character I'm not good at will be paired with a character that I've mastered to make a new word.

Your concern may be 100% valid for someone who knows >= 3000 characters because due to frequency of occurrence the probability of seeing the word in a different but similar context would be lower. That same argument has a flip side saying that statistically likely characters will be thrown at you as you study and add words.

DependableSkeleton, I usually just mark a character wrong when I see the "New X label pop up", unless I know it *really* well already.

since you stated the title as a question, I would like to offer my own view:
if you got the pinyin wrong but therefore the definition right the next day, your skritter stack will lose redundancy because of the bonus and you might still learn the word via the pinyin and writing anyway.
I still welcome this as a feature especially if you globally study all 4 parts of each word, because I can move on to new voc faster and I am not so much bothered by having added too many similar words before.
And in case I got something right but I still want to see it again sooner I hit the yellow button to shorten the time by a factor of ca. 2,5

I'm in the same situation. After a few weeks of travel and a few more of being really sick, I have about 1400 overdue. I do the same as @lechuan - I just mark them wrong if I don't want to wait months before I see it again.

I have noticed that, if I mark a new item correct, it will be 9 days (if I remember correctly). I just mark them wrong the first two times, which gives me a shorter spacing and a few more regular repetitions before the reviews become months apart.

On the other hand, it's really only character definitions that I struggle with. Multi-character words are far easier to remember, particularly the writing, pinyin and tones, since the characters are often familiar, and if they're not, they're bound to come up in another word soon enough.