Quick question. I'm currently on vacation and I was just checking up on my reviews online and they are piling up like crazy. Is that meant to be like this? I get greeted by "Back from vacation? Welcome back! Re-enable your account to continue your studies." though.

Vacation mode has nothing to do with reviews... it is only with respect to ADDING new words.

You can only add words with a paid account, and vacation mode makes your vacation "unpaid" for the time you selected, but extends the end date of your paid time.

However the reviews for words you already added will continue to pile up as usual... Your brain doesn't stop forgetting characters while you're on vacation... (arguably, it'll forget more).

waaaaw, that really sounds like you should never go on vacation...

i dont want to imagine my number of reviews after two weeks of no access to the server ...

isnt there a way to "freeze" the account on demand of the user? (question for the skritter team)

How do you tell your brain it's not allowed to forget anything while you're on vacation? Reviews aren't scheduled because the Skritter team is a mean taskmaster. Reviews are scheduled because your brain needs to be reminded of your vocabulary.

what do you do if you are at some place with no wifi or other internet access?

i would not like to come back after two weeks abroad and see my reviews jumped to 20.000 or more.

would be nice if the developers could offer a "freeze"-option.

I use the iOS app in those situations. I lug around an iPad which I *only* use for Skritter. An older-model used iPod Touch would be totally worth it. But if you don't like this option, and if you really insist on it, you can use the Save Me feature which pushes back reviews. This is basically what a "freeze" option would do.

To be honest though, it doesn't really make sense to use an SRS system and ignore the spaced repetitions. If Skritter enables you to ignore reviews when they ought to come up, then later on when you see them you'll have mostly forgotten them and you will have wasted some of your earlier studying efforts. The main bottleneck to learning Chinese is the flawed hardware we have in our skulls.

thanks for the explanation. I also bought my first Ipod-touch ONLY because of skritter...

I have a ton of reviews piled up right now, and I used to feel bummed out. Just read "Motivation Hacker" and Nick pointed out that just because you're not learning new words while going through reviews doesn't mean you're not learning. Re-learning forgotten words is just as valuable as learning new words.

If you know you're going to go on vacation, it pays to set yourself to not add any new words for a while beforehand and to overstudy so as to clear out a lot of the reviews that would have become due during your trip.