When I finished the beastly challenge, I was burned out pretty badly. A few lazy days and a few extra skipped days due to a new girlfriend put me in a pretty bad spot with over 2000 reviews to learn. I've overcome deficits like that a couple times, though it's not easy. However, I've been having a really hard time overcoming this one - for a while I've been getting almost as many new reviews a day as I can work off, not to mention the old stuff. Part of the problem is due to missing days due to family stuff, but I think an equally big issue is that I've got a ton of stuff that was added during the challenge that I still haven't mastered.

The big problem with this is that the trouble words are still too spread-out for me to pound them into my head through Skritter. I know there are other options for learning this material, such as making my own flashcards and pounding them a bit extra on the side, but I wonder if there might not be a way to improve Skritter's SRS algorithm to deal with situations like this so that I could get this stuff into my memory and work my review queue back down to more encouraging levels.

On a last note, you guys might want to change the wording on the Professor's response to the word "family" - "Sorry, we don't have family plans" sounds like a rather personal piece of information, though I did figure it out eventually. :D

What about tagging the trouble words with the star feature, then drilling them for a few minutes every day for a few days?

A novel approach might be to write down the problem words on paper a few times. That usually helps me.

So it sounds like part of the problem is that you've got way too many short-term items because of the challenge. These items can't get enough attention and so are slow in making it out to longer intervals, where they'll be less burdensome.

It would be tough for Skritter to realize this sort of situation, because it would require looking closely at a lot of items at once and realizing how many of them are at short intervals, and comparing that to the total, or to how much you are currently doing each day. That's a tough problem, as it's designed to do the scheduling dynamically based on small glimpses of what's coming up.

What I would recommend to get back on your feet is to go through and hit "4" on every review that is less than two weeks old. Do all the other reviews, but just push back those short-term ones without even looking at the prompt other than to see when you last studied it. It will inflate your retention rates a bit, but it should do a good job of digging you out.

I've changed the Professor's wording there from "plans" to "discounts"!

Hmm, I'm a bit wary of messing up the SRS for those items - I think I'll try one of the more manual methods to dig myself out a bit better. I was mostly posting to point out an area that the SRS might be able to do better, in case there was a ready fix for the situation.

Day two of using a starred list for those problem words and things are getting better quickly...

Another idea for this problem (I have it myself) is to choose just one prompt (writing or pinyin or whatnot) and work through THAT list until it's manageable, doing small amounts of time on the other prompts until the first one is back to normal. Then add in another prompt, work it down while staying up with the reviews on the first one, and slowly add the others back in.