Quick q - I think I know what's going on, but want to confirm.

I've been piling through the HSK1 and HSK2 lists. This should total about 3000 words and 1450 characters, give or take.

Currently my progress tab shows about 2000 words and 1500 characters learned. I'd assumed this meant I'd learned all the characters but not all the words composed thereof - eg I might have learned 你 and 好 but not 你好。

However I've noticed that I'm not getting any new words added, and when I check my active lists drop down both HSK1 and HSK2 have gone - so I'm assuming I've learned them all. Which begs the question, where are the other 1,000 words that should be recording on the progress screen.

I'm assuming that what is happening is that you are counting single character words - eg, 把，玩， etc, only as characters, not as words. Am I right?

I believe this is correct. A "word" is a string of two or more characters in Skritter-ese while a character is simply a character (in a word or alone). This means that adding a character that you already know in the context of a word but not on its own will not 'count' in your statistics at all - but big deal.

Correct--for the purposes of "words learned progress", think of "words" as short for "multi-character words".

A word in Chinese is a funny concept anyway. We treat "word" pretty loosely, but generally one can contain one or more characters.

I'd say that's not the right way to handle it - 玩，把，事，et al are words and there's no reason they shouldn't be showing up as words learned. Not a major issue as it only affects the numbers, but I can see it causing a little confusion.

@themagicpen - you are totally correct but then again there are a lot of phrases and grammar patterns (lian....ye/连。。。也)that I study in Skritter that aren't really words either so either way it's slightly incorrect. The idea is to gauge how much you know and for this, it works.

True enough, but that's 'words as vocab items' which makes sense, as opposed to 'words, unless they happen to only have one character', which doesn't.

As for measuring how much you know - the 'words learned' figure does not tell you how many words you've learned. Adding words and characters learned doesn't help, as some of those characters will not be words in their own right.

Not sure if this is worth fixing - it presumably makes things easier on the back end.

Well, my understanding is that in conversation 'two+ part words' are so often cut down to 'one part characters', that you would then have to consider the 'one part characters' words. Even though they're not really, but that's how it's used.

Some things are clear cut. '经常’ we can consider a two part word. 百 could be considered a one part word. But what about '常‘？Is it a character or a cut down 'two part word' acting as a 'one part word'? My Chinese really isn't good enough for a good example, but it seems there's a lot of leeway here.

And I guess I feel for them, as I wouldn't want to go through their entire database of characters adding tags to decide which one might constitute a word or not :p.

I can't provide any input on Chinese, but I can say that in Japanese, characters that can be words as well are doubled. So if you add 水 to your studies, it gets counted as both one character and one word. This was at least partially because we needed somewhere to put all the character specific information, like on and kun readings. Just in case any Japanese students were wondering!

Help me out here. I've completed HSK1 and HSK2, have currently got HSK3 adding in. My stats under progress are:
Words 2725 2706
Characters 1826 1800

So how, given that, do I figure out how much further I've got to go?

In total, our HSK lists cover 3109 characters in 8619 words. I just checked and there are 6890 multiple-character words, with 1429 single characters on their own.

So you're 59% there with characters and 40% there with words.