I am not sure how you do it, but I need to repeat the character a few times until it sticks.

I wonder if for the initial learning, it might make sense to let you repeat the item x times (according to settings) in a row before moving on.
Right now I always delete with the eraser and draw again until it sticks (works but takes some additional clicks).

Nick asked me to post here to see more opinions on the idea.

So your call,
Alex

It is my personal opinion that repeating one character several times deviates from the methodology of a spaced repetition system a bit. The first time I review something new I have found that taking an extra minute or two and analyzing it produces a more lasting result. Repeating one thing over and over is listed in my book as cramming and usually translates to short term memory. Again, just my personal opinion.

Though I can see the merit in adding a repeat previous character button or function that doesn't effect review statistics.

@mcfarljw, that doesn't need to deviate from spaced repetition theory. If you just learned something for the first time, when should it be repeated? If it's something hard, the answer might be "almost right away". Then, once you get it right after a delay of X, you should wait some multiple of X before seeing it again. So, once you can erase it and get it right, you should wait a little bit, then try it again.

As a result of the previous discussion, the Skritter guys changed something behind the scenes so that new characters could be repeated more quickly. The developers can give you more details, but I think how it works is that the system tries to figure out how long to wait to repeat new items based on your actual performance, and will reduce the delay if you are finding new characters too difficult. So I think they looked at my own personal statistics, and, based on the numbers they found, they reduced that minimum delay to 30 seconds.

As a result of that change, I no longer spend a lot of time erasing and re-drawing, as the system repeats the new characters quite quickly, at least for me. It might be different for others with different stats.

@MasterOfComboBoxes, maybe they could do something similar for you and take a look at your "new character delay" setting or whatever it was they looked at in my case.

James

@jww1066: I interpreted MasterOfComboBoxes's statement more as wanting to drill a character. Almost like a character sheet that wants you to write it 10 times. You might be able to recall it it after the first couple tries, but do it 10 times total for good measure. Which would seem more to be immediate repetition rather than after you get it correct slightly spacing it to see if you effectively retained it.

Maybe you could clarify a bit. Would the system move on once you got it correct or would it feed it to you immediately after a few more times even if you got it correct?

I remember I used to view the answer of a new character and then quickly scratch it in without really trying to absorb it. This would work eventually but took significantly more repetitions to ingrain it in my brain.

I think our best idea here so far is to have the erase button highlight when you finish writing a character you forgot that will have an interval scheduled shorter than Skritter can reasonably repeat it.

So if I keep missing 嚏 and its interval is down to the 30 second minimum, but really it should be less than 30 seconds for you to have a good chance of remembering it, then the erase button would highlight, inviting me to write it again right then. If we tried to schedule it again any sooner, it wouldn't come up in time because of the next words already loaded in advance.

This would only affect people that frequently forget characters at very short intervals, to the point where they are down to 30 seconds. Most learners get a longer interval where it doesn't make sense to write a character more than once in a row. (Yours is actually a good bit higher than that right now, Alex, but perhaps you introduce many words with characters you already know?)

I agree that mcfarljw's suggestion is probably better than writing it repeatedly. Of course, having the component breakdown visible right there would make that analysis a lot easier.

@mcfarljw, I think it fits very well with spaced repetition the reason being is that if you have not learned it, you aren't ready to move on to the spaced repetition part. I think it would be useful to have a button (a big eraser) that allows for repeating an entire word rather than a single character if you want immediate practice; it's hard with a long word as when you hit back it shows the character and the small version is shown.

@2shanghai: Of course you have to learn it before you can start spacing out the review of the material. What the poster seemed to be implying was that they wanted to continuously loop one item (even after they got it correct) several times. That doesn't follow with the methodology of spaced repetition. As soon as you get it right you move on to something else. I can practice something 10 times in a row and get it correct 9 of those times, but the next day I might forget it. Hence why I believe it to be over kill to drill terms consecutively and better to start incrementally working on remembering them over time (albeit short time intervals in the beginning).

Hello,

actually I was only thinking about the initial learning. I am rewriting to kind of activate the hand movement memory.
I just saw that with x, you can erase fairly simple, so the repeat method I am using is fairly easy to realize. As I am using a tablet, a pen gesture might actually be an idea...

McFarl's proposition to reflect a bit more is certainly a good point too.

I have mainly learned characters and few words, so I never faced the problem of erasing the whole word. That might explain the higher rate Nick saw. I am mainly following a book I bought here in China, which has most frequent characters (500 total) but also groups similar ones.
I can enter the rest and publish the list if someone is interested.

BTW: Making published lists searchable for keywords if there are going to be more soon, might be useful, or did I just oversee this possibility?

@mcfarljw, aah, yeah - that would be fairly useless. That's exactly how I didn't learn how to spell English words in grade school (write X 15 times, have a test, forget how to spell it, repeat).

The custom list search will eventually be better--we just used the minimum viable product for now, since the Google custom search wasn't working. And we'll add tags and such. Those will apply to textbooks as well as custom lists.