Is there something wrong when your progress in Skritter comes to a standstill, even though you study every day? I have reached a point where I am DESPERATE for new words to be added in my reviews and DESPERATE to move on to the next level of learning. But it has been the same old reviews over and over again. Great for memory retention, but terrible for a sense of moving forward. I am stuck just short of completing the HSK 2 level. I am already reviewing daily in Pleco what Skritter should be providing automatically at my level of learning. My retention rate, thanks to the reviews, is 95.3%.

To address the problem, I have:
(1) Lowered my retention rate to the minimum of 87% (don't like to do this!)
(2) Set add word frequency to FAST (I prefer normal)
(3) Set move on to next section when done
(4) Of course, kept up to date on all my reviews.

None of this is working so far. And the manual add button does not work for me. It does not add anything I hadn't reviewed before, and most of time it is grayed out.

I read the posts to this forum on this particular subject, but have not been able to learn why my forward progress has stopped cold. If someone has had this problem and solved it, I would grateful to learn how it was done.

If it is grey it means, that means there is no list to add from. When you go to the Study Page, do you see a list under "Adding Words From" or is it saying "You are not adding any words from any list".

Under "Adding Words from" or "Reviewing Words from list" you should see your HSK 2 list. You can open it and check, whether there are any words left, which are totally blank / grey in all 4 categories, if not, then you have nothing to add from - just activate HSK 3.

Roland, thank you for your response. My Study Page normally says "You are not adding any words from any list" in italics (right under "You're automatically adding words"), but, not, I suspect, for the reason you give. There were plenty of words left to study. What I think could be happening is that under Study Settings for the list the Study Mode doesn't stay on "Add" but reverts to "Review." Why? I never save it to "Review." This is the only reason I can account for the constant recycling of old material. Fiddling with Study Settings caused the program to unleash the last 30-40 words in my HSK 2 study. It now says I'm finished with the whole list. Brother! Suddenly it's too much material at one time and I have to change my settings back to normal speed and at a higher retention rate.

I would appreciate a correction from any more experienced users if I have made the wrong analysis.

In any case, with the pathway cleared up, I hope I have returned to the normal progression where section by section comes up automatically as I master the material.

Not knowing what the state of the list was in beforehand, I can't say what caused your HSK2 list to be paused. Did you have the section movement set to manual at any point? If that was on manual when you finished adding an HSK2 section, that would have sent it into "Reviewing Words From", and then switching the setting back wouldn't automatically unpause it.

The 30-40 words at once probably came from the overpracticing and "fast" adding speed you had, once the words were available. "Fast" becomes "really fast" if you have been overpracticing and don't have any due reviews.

Nick, to answer your question, no, I have never had the section movement set to manual, ever.

I noticed from posts to this forum that others have had complaints along similar lines. Perhaps there is a step or two in the algorithm that needs work? I'll check my Study Mode more often now. I love the site and hope you keep up the good work.

Nick, I had realized this under 2 scenario's:
1. I added manually 20 or 30 words, they then came all in a row, one after the other (no problem for me),
2. on my IPad, it said, item added, however, the item actually didn't show up unless the ios app did a proper sync (this problem was discussed in another blog, can't find it now). After the sync, then a lot of these new items are showing up comparable to 1. above.
So I think, once the sync mechanism is improved, this problem also might be gone. In the meantime, after seeing a number of "item added" I force the app to do a proper sync, e.g. go to the mainpage or sometimes even do a shut-down of the app and re-start it.
I never realized 30 - 40 words, but in this case the combination of low number of items due, fast adding speed and sync problem might cause such a problem.

I'm also having a problem with adding new words. I just activated my account yesterday, and I'm trying to get through one list. I have changed adding to fast, and marked the list to "add more words while I practice"and I have not marked it to pause after completing a section. Still, after all of this the list keeps returning to "reviewing words from" after finishing each section (about 50 vocab) and I have to manually keep adding my list back into the "adding words from" section. I get down to 0 reviews, and it won't add anything new. Even when I try to add something manually, it says I have no lists to add from. Any advice?

not sure why, but it seems to be working now.