Although I'd gotten up to 1300+ characters and lots and lots of words, I recently nuked everything and started over, and it's been a really productive step. I don't know if other people are as scattered in their studies as I was, but I had bits and pieces of all sorts of different lists, random items I had added to my queue, etc. and nothing really hung together in any sort of systematic way. I was also uncertain if the words I was practicing were words I would actually find useful.

When I started fresh, I chose a few small lists with useful words: parts of the body, clothing, and Chinese provinces and cities. As my main source of characters I started with the "1000 most frequent" list. I used the 500 most frequent characters to find words in the Skritter Word Finder (I forget who built that tool, but it's insanely useful) and added the first couple of thousand of those to my queue to reinforce the characters and learn their contextual meanings. Since the word finder sorts by frequency, I can be certain I added only common words.

One problem I ran into is that the "Delete All" button is extremely slow. I don't know what you guys have in the backend, but with a database it would be very quick to do a "delete all from ... where userid=?". As it was, it looked like it was deleting items one by one from my queue and my set of characters to study, and it took many hours to complete.

Another problem is that the Word Finder doesn't have any limit on the number of words it finds, and when I put 1000 words in as input it locked up. I wouldn't imagine that most people would need to add 10,000 words at a time to their queue, so allowing people to control the number of words returned would probably give much better performance.

So, I don't necessarily recommend that others follow suit, but if you're frustrated with the set of words and characters you're studying it can be very satisfying and motivating to start over in this way.

James

P.S. I should have said "when I put 1000 CHARACTERS in as input it locked up".

Interesting approach. Please keep us updated on how it goes as your new strategy progresses, whether you can keep it light and free.

We have Google App Engine on the backend, and yeah, it's slow at deleting. Fortunately there are few circumstances where we have to delete a bunch of stuff. We could spawn a bunch more workers to delete things more quickly, but it's not a priority (we hope not too many people are deleting everything).

I wonder if it would have been more useful for you to delete all the words, but keep the characters? I guess characters should come back up to their previous levels relatively quickly.

Isn't this the advantage in using cram lists? You can then polish sections and everything is neatly organised and you have some idea of how long ago you polished x or y.

@nick - It would maybe have been useful if I could have deleted everything from my queue, but I had already added so many random/rare/unlikely-to-be-used characters that I just needed to wipe everything out. Part of the benefit is simply motivation, now that I am certain that the characters and words I am studying are all high-frequency.

As for how it's helped, I feel much more motivated and have already gotten back up to about 300 characters after only a week, as many of them are ones I already knew.

@whootie - not sure what the cram lists would have done for me in this case, but I haven't used them much. I thought they allowed you to study one list of characters intensively. My problem was that for several months I had been obsessively adding all sorts of random things to my queue, and the signal to noise ratio had gotten pretty low.

James

I've also considered starting afresh. Not because I have added random crap, but because I'm getting to a point where I'm starting to worry about remembering the first parts I learned.

I _could_ cram-list my way through, but that has several problems. First, it is a manual process so it requires a lot of administration. And second, I would like to use the full spaced repitition machinery to "sort" all the words/characters I know this far, and have an accurate representation of known stuff at the end.

Actually, I did something like this when first joining skritter, because I at that point came straight from a semester of learning Chinese in Taiwan. I created a list for my textbook, and in just a few weeks was caught up. It felt very focused and productive. It also gave me a good base to confidently start exploring new vocabulary.

In fact, it felt sort of like a mental "defragmentation". Maybe my ("Chinese") brain requires a quarterly reinstall, just like a Windows partition?

Hmm, George has expressed desire to do the same thing--run through all the words he knows to make sure he isn't forgetting ones that aren't due for a long time. It's possible we could add a study mode for that.

What do others think? Is that something attractive--to order reviews by last-reviewed instead of spaced-repetition readiness?

Might it then not make more sense to just have those words come up sooner? I am also slightly curious as to whether I really do remember all those characters I studied with Skritter half a year ago, but then again, theoretically the spacing should be such that they get reviewed on time.

If a study mode is added, however, there should be the option of being able to move information to the main studying, i.e. characters which I find out I don't know anymore should then automatically have deleted progress slates in the main skrittering tool so that I can relearn them again.

Me, too. I don't know the theory on SRS, have trusted that it works, but from time to time some old character shows up and I am not as certain of it (or I have even forgotten it) as I should be.

So what about those characters from half a year ago? When I look at the vocab viewer I see the "next" time for some is 9 years! Really? I see that those characters are ones that fairly often come up in word combinations so they're exercised often anyhow. But then I wonder about the ones that have not come up... could I recall those?

I cannot quite imagine having my queue suddenly inundated by ALL my characters (essentially what James has done) but maybe there's another approach. Nick, you suggest a "last-reviewed" option, as another study option. I'm not sure what you mean exactly nor do I know what dials you can turn to alter the SRS algorithm but what about a maximum on the "next" time, say 4 months or one that individuals can set. That way I can be sure that I see every character at least at that interval but they wouldn't all show up at once.

Good idea Nick. I would like to have an option to select the known characters/words which haven't shown up for xx months.

I started with a clean slate too. With the holidays and then loads of computer problems I was off Skritter for quite awhile. A fresh start sure does feel good.

I will admit to having blown away my queue about six months ago after I added a lot of garbage to it. What I might suggest though, is simply to overpractice - a lot - if you want to make sure that what needs to get reviewed is reviewed. Skritter will give you stuff that's not quite ready for review, then stuff that's not ready for review, then stuff you really really should know (你，我，她）.

It might be nice to have a testing mode where I could see how much I know - either from my queue or a list (e.g. HSK, textbook) I pick from. Take, say 25 words and have me write them but take them at random instead of based on SRS. This would be useful for those of us who want to run the HSK some time (I would think that if the characters are new they would not get added)

Another half-way might be the ability to re-run a list; that is instead of skipping over already added words have an option to review them, I hesitate to mention it though, as it would make the system more complex and potentially less user friendly.

Well, two of the larger ideas behind the next vocabulary list overhaul we're doing is that you'll be able to 1) study everything from one list and 2) have it sort-of cram, where it'll eventually review stuff you know really well even when it's not as due. It won't be cramming, it'll still be spaced repetition, but you'll have a readiness bonus to older items such that they will come up eventually.

This would be just a tweak to how scheduling works when you're overpracticing, though, not a general change. I do want to insist that spaced repetition does work and that you can remember things for more than four months at a time with the right review schedule. If you personally can't for some reason, then your personal long-term scheduling will eventually adapt until you can.

How about a "test" of studied characters. It might be done every few months or so and you just get quizzed on characters you should know, i.e. have "studied" according to Skritter. I know that might be some work for a few Skritter users, but then again, characters you know you can get through quickly (perhaps 7 characters a minute?). This test would then not mainly be for us skritter users to see how much we can remember but rather a great tool for you programmers to adjust the timed repetition/time intervalls.

I don't think it should be necessary to start afresh - isn't the SRS algorithm supposed to take care of everything? I try to learn the context etc. of words elsewhere and just let Skritter take care of making me remember how to write them.

I do think the algorithm (kitten?) can be a little optimistic in how long I remember things for. It usually seems to leave it until I've forgotten it a little bit rather than scheduling it just before that.

I think a test mode could work, where it just schedules by "last studied first". (Although Scott might kibosh me here citing the backend.)

If you kept getting long-term items wrong more frequently, the kitten would eventually adjust your scheduling for long-term items to grow more slowly, but it takes a lot longer for those adjustments to happen given the timescales involved.

You could sort your studies in any way the viewer can be ordered (the 'next' column uses the same index as the practice page). It would be a bit weird though; would have to make sure things scheduled for even later after being studied don't come up again, things like that. I feel like that would get repetitive, because each time you come in you'd likely study the same set of words over and over again, since when you study something it'll get put at the head of that line once again. We could probably figure out some way to deal with little things like that, but yeah, some considerations!

Hi Guys,

This is a direct quote from a message I sent to George on January 19. Basically, I reached the same impasse as James at around 1200 characters and felt I needed a fresh reset after carefully considering the alternatives including cram lists. I will add another post about this because I feel that there are some very important issues here. Some are to do with SRS meeting the real world of multiple learning sources, and part are to do with the addition of new feature to Skritter and changing learning goals.

"
I have just pushed the button that blows away all of my history and I think it was the right idea given the situation I am in. I'll explain and maybe you can suggest alternatives or my experience can constitute constructive feedback.

There were a couple of problems but the main one was that I was trying to tighten up my learning goals. I wanted to introduce your definition practice and I wanted to be a lot stricter about how well I answer the prompts. What was happening to me is that the repetition from the repeated learning was failing me and I could no longer learn new stuff (or even old stuff I was forgetting) because the repetitions were too far apart.

So what I did was:
(1) export my complete list of words in my history in Time Spent order.
(2) delete my history by pressing the button. I actually had to do it twice because it froze the first time.
(3) Import my list of words in Time Spent order as a Custom List.
(4) Start from zero adding words from this Custom List slowly with definitions turned on.

I did this yesterday and have practised for and hour yesterday and today and it is like a breath of fresh air. I can focus on learning again and can even start adding new vocabulary from ChinesePod again (I just learned the word for computer mouse and web page).

There were a couple of unfortunate side-effects of doing (2) that I don't understand:
(1) All of the time I have worked on Skritter now seems to be forgotten.
(2) The lists I was studying at the time are forgotten -- I had to find them again in the Vocabulary section.
(3) The only thing kept from before is my preferences and my custom lists -- you really do delete everything.

Nonetheless, it was the right thing for me to do. I feel that I can learn again using Skritter rather than be just reminded about how little I know. It will take a little while before the database says that I know 1200 characters as before but I think I will get to a useful place more quickly.

Now for the recommendation:
It would have been a lot better for me if I could have just deleted all of the words that I had not yet learned properly and re-inserted them into a queue. It doesn't bother me that I will see a lot of words that I really know well over the next few weeks -- I can use the review and Skritter is pretty good about learning that I know them. The problem Skritter had in my case is that it couldn't adapt to my changed goals.

There was another issue for me. I am going to be taking a couple weeks to a month off from Skritter now because of an important surgery and wanted to create an environment that would be fun when I came back. Coming back to a huge backlog of testing with a lot of stuff forgotten would be pretty depressing. I wanted to have something to look forward to.

Again I want to emphasize that I am very happy with my results so far using Skritter. It really has helped me learn more characters in a shorter time than ever before. The spaced review really does work and the Skritter implementation is excellent.
"

I have changed my mind a little about the recommendation but am enjoying being back in the flow of learning Chinese (and now Japanese characters) with all of the exciting new Skritter features turned on.
(the surgery also went well).

Perhaps this suggests a "Give Up!" option. If your learning level for a word declines below some threshold (say, 5 minutes) and the number of not-yet-learned words in active circulation is above a certain level (20ish?), Skritter will let you give up on that word. It would go back into the queue and only be re-added when your number of not-yet-learned words drops back below a reasonable number. That way, you avoid the feeling of helplessness associated with constantly being queried with words that you don't know.

Alternatively, it could be a button like "Save Me!" that would un-add the least-learned words in active circulation until the number of not-yet-learned words is below a specified number.

I just nuked too, going to start with the radicals list, then ONE LIST AT A TIME...

i nuked mine too a couple of weeks ago after a busy business related trip, as i could not keep up with the reviews, i wish i have followed your method faceleg, i guess it is time to nuke the list again, i will wait as my stats have been nuked too, so no chance for getting an avatar :(

Even with 4000+ in the review queue after a long absence from Skritter, with a couple of weeks of an hour's practice a day, the review queue was down to 2500ish. I'd say no need to delete your list - just accept that you'll have a few weeks of not remembering stuff that you think should be obvious and before long Skritter will work out where you're really at and schedule accordingly.

@ximeng: depends how many useless words one has added - I had a load of movie names, actors, obscure countries etc in my list. I thought they'd be GREAT when I was in New Zealand, but I realized how much time they waste now I'm back in China. Everyday I see many many signs with characters I can't read, in stores (fruit, vegetables), on the road (transportation words)...

Now I've gone through the radical list I've discovered a bonus - I can sometimes remember a character I don't know and ask my wife to tell me what it is when I "spell" it to her with radicals...

Now I've started a methodical approach (each time I add a list I discuss what would be most useful with my wife), I don't think I'll need to delete everything again.