It's nice to see some mainstream press for spaced repetition. I was also interested to see the recommendations about varying the study environment and cross-training (i.e. studying a variety of things that reinforce one another rather than one single thing).

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/07/health/views/07mind.html?_r=1&ref=general&src=me&pagewanted=all

Thanks for that link, very interesting reading and totally in line with my own experiences both from having Children in school and my own study.

Yes, really interesting. Finally some study advice that is more real. Thanks for sharing.

Now I have to consider lugging my desktop back and forth between rooms when I want to study to make it more efficient!

I was thinking about this and more randomness in your study environment being a good thing.

I went and changed my study language from Chinese->Chinese (which is pretty much English for now) into German->English. I am familiar enough with German for that to work. I think it is a nice change and I might like to use it for once in a while, but I am not entirely sure yet. I might like to see Dutch added too. Just to be sure, this is not because I cannot work with English, but I think learning from German to Chinese and Dutch to Chinese and English to Chinese and sometimes swapping it out might be useful to learn better.

I already saw one character where the English and German translation were entirely different. I wonder how to deal with that though.

After thinking a bit more I kind of found it might be nice to see more randomness in the Skritter environment, such as the Chinese font being used. Perhaps sometimes the font could be changed to look more hand-written and other times be more bold or generally weird in some other way.

The same way the layout or background might be changed. Perhaps some kind of skinning would be cool where everyone can create their own practice page using HTML tags and just include a few special tags like and such to include the things we need for practice.

I am not sure what else could be made more random. I wonder what everyone else thinks. I bet a lot of people would not like this at all.

I was thinking more about studying away from the computer, myself. ;)

Haha that is definitely a good idea. I ordered Chinese in a Flash Volumes 1 to 4 today (flash cards) to have a try at studying offline, just to change things up a bit. I'll have to wait a few weeks for it to be delivered though.

How does everyone else get their flashcards? I looked online for a flashcard printing service but could not really find any.

Perhaps I have to buy some in Taiwan next time I am there or have them printed at one of those corner photo shops. I am sure it should be cheap.

I used to make flash cards by hand. Now with Anki and Skritter I've moved all that stuff to the computer; it's too much trouble otherwise. I still have a couple thousand flash cards in boxes that I supposedly am going to do something with someday.

Stick with anki. On the topic of moving about on study, I found it a lot less bothersome to do anki on my ipod touch, even if just around the house. So Skritter/Mac Anki/ipod. Change of scene and all that. Feels like I'm actually doing something different :p.