I am wondering if anyone has had the fortune to be able to study chinese on a full time basis? I am currently trying to do some full time self study and I am wondering how many words and/or reviews per day people are able to hit.

ie Its easy to say, you were able to do x hours per day, but how many words does that equate to?

When you say full time do you mean studying Chinese as if it was a full time job? ie 40 hours per week?

Yep I mean as if you were a full time student? I currently have two full days per week I can dedicate to solid chinese study, along with a fair amount each other day. I feel like its still a bit slow and so im interested to compare with other people. (:

I've studied Russian for about 8 hrs. a day, 5 days a week in a classroom situation. This was while I was being trained as a Russian linguist in the Air Force. We did a mixture a dialogue, pattern drills, grammar, conversation, and Russian culture. Granted we had teachers to guide us and goofing off was not an option, but I can't imagine just cramming characters and words for very long.

How long do you plan to do this before you expand your study of Chinese? If you're not learning to read, I would imagine retaining the characters will be harder.

As far as how many characters/words you might expect to learn per hour will probably increase over time. I had a Chinese professor who felt that at around 400 characters, the rate of learning characters will increase.

Your question is very interesting and I hope you get a lot of answers.

There was a guy cramming for HSK that did 43 hours of Skritter time in one week, with almost 11 hours one day. I can't remember his username right now or I'd look up how many reviews he was clearing.

I would zone out long, long before that.

I did some quick calculations on the newsletter top learners from this month, who ranged from 637 reviews per hour to 1361. This is progress page total reviews, not review bar reviews: every item is counted, not just due items. So you can compare your review rate to that, if you want. These Skritterers are doing 49+ hours a month. This statistic will be dramatically affected by the number of tones studied, though, since those are so quick to do.

@nick

So what do reviews mean? Aren't you interested in characters or words learned? And what is considered learned? I would imagine you would still periodically review learned items. I've read the entries in the FAQ that refer to my questions like the explanation of your SRS algorithm, but am still in the dark.

Perhaps it is harder for me to see what is happening because I'm seeing many of the characters for the first time in Skritter. So for now, at least, there is a lot of repetition. I'm using "Rapid Literacy in Chinese" and pretty much only look a lesson when I've
"learned" character.

If this is covered somewhere, please forgive me for repeating questions.

Reviews here are what's counted on the progress page reviews statistics: when one item is updated, that's a review. There are usually multiple items inside a word, for individual characters and for different parts (like writing, tone, etc.).

"Learned" is when the interval is over 12 hours. You still periodically review everything in My Words, yeah.

If you are seeing a lot of repetition of new characters which you already know--are you marking them correct the first time you see them? They should be scheduled out pretty quickly if you always get them right. If you get them wrong the first time, it can talk longer to get them out of the way.

Regarding how you measure progress, reviews are not an accurate measure. One person might review twice as many cards per day (ie twice the speed), but may not retain as much as another person who does less reviews. Or someone might have a better brain and require less reviews before they have learnt a card. I would consider "Learnt" as meaning you dont forget the card after a certain interval.

And I should clarify, I dont study words or characters, I primarily study sentence reading and sentence writing. So it is difficult to compare with someone that only studies words. Living in taiwan it would be quite impossible for me to not practice and use what I have learnt on a day to day basis. It happens wether you like it or not.

Currently I have to maintain a ratio of 50/50 study and not study.If I study non stop, I can only force myself up to about an hour and a half. If I do 50/50 I can go for 5-6 hours. I am not sure of what the optimal ratio is, but the idea is to prevent yourself getting to that point where you cant focus any more.

I am seeing a lot of repetition because I'm seeing many characters for the first time in Skritter so it may take several reviews before I can write the character from memory. So far I feel the extra repetitions are helping to "solidify" the characters in memory.

I may experiment with spending some time looking at the characters in the text before the lesson is added.

Yes, reviews isn't a very good measure, but you are still submitting the character-level reviews for your writing and reading, so your speed is somewhat comparable to people studying writing and reading, be it characters or words. Retention will vary as well, but it generally pays to do reviews quicker and think less, in my experience, as long as you grade honestly and slow down when it comes to the really hard ones.