Why has the "add to Queue" option been removed from the Vocab Lists? I'm a fairly new user, but I had become habituated to using the Queue as my primary way of adding words. My previous method (now deprecated, apparently) had been to open up a particular list, select all words and add them to the Queue. I gather that the preferred way to do it after the recent 改革 is to study an entire list or study an entire textbook, which works ok for my primary text where I generally want to study everything on that list. But I'm used to supplementing my textbook by bumming around all the other lists, cherry picking a few words here and there that sound useful or interesting and adding them to the Queue. Under the old system this was pretty easy to do, as I could just hit the check box next to the few that I wanted and then click "add." I guess I could accomplish the same thing now by manually writing down the words I think are interesting, navigating to the "My Words" tab, clicking on Queue, and then typing in those words that I wanted to add, but that's incredibly tedious. Is there no way to casually browse the lists and add only one or two words from that list to the Queue/My Words?

I don't know what browser you use, but if you use Chrome I can highly recommend you the following extension: https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/kkmlkkjojmombglmlpbpapmhcaljjkde

With this helpful pop-up dictionary you can very easily cherry pick words from any website (not just skritter) and add to your queue.
All you have to do is hover your mouse over a chinese character, you get its definition in a little pop-up bubble and if you want to add it to your queue just press "s".
I have to warn you though, it's quite easy to get carried away, and at the beginning I added a huge amount of words because it was just so easy ;)

Hmm... I'm at work now, where I've only got IE, but I do use Chrome at home. I'll give it a shot.

At best though that seems like a work-around. The corollary to the problem I originally described is that it's difficult to preemptively eliminate a single word or two from list that I'm studying. Even when using the "Study Textbook" option, I'd like to be able to have my teacher...er, wife, as the case may be...take a look at the vocab lesson before adding it and be able to screen some out. Under the old system she used to take a glance through the textbook list for each lesson before I added it, and usually for one or two of them she'd say "this word is outdated, we don't say it that way," etc., and I'd just uncheck it before adding the rest to my Queue. Now there doesn't seem to be any way to do that; you either study the whole list or nothing. Granted I figured out how to "unstudy" words once they've been added, but since words aren't added to "My Words" instantly, I end up having to wait a day or two for an unwanted word to get added, remember which one it was, and then go back and unadd it. This is inefficient. I'd like to be able to tell it not to add that word in the first place.

I appreciate the desire to add some more structure to the list system, but one of the things that really made Skritter work for me was the ability to leverage the enormous time-savings that come from having all these pre-made lists, but still be able to quickly and easily tinker with them to suit me (without having to manually key in my own lists). I feel like a lot of that control has been lost with the changes.

OK, I retract my previous complaints; additional fiddling seems to have come up with solutions for both. For the benefit of those who were experiencing the same concerns as I (I'm vain enough to assume there are any):

Problem 1 (quickly adding just one or two words on a list to Queue/My Words), It looks like you can click on a the word in the list, which will bring up a screen with the word and definition. From there you can click each of the four green buttons to add Writing, Tone, Pinyin, and Definition. It's a little clunky having five click-throughs to get it, but it seems to work. It's also not entirely clear whether it's going into the Queue, to be added gradually along with everything else, or if it goes right into the rotation. But better than nothing.

For Problem Number 2 (want to cut out just one or two words from a list), it appears the "Remix List" function is what I was looking for. It's underneath the big green "study list" button on the description page for that list, and it will let you modify the list for your own use, including deleting words.

I'm having the same problem, actually- I'm finding it really frustrating to navigate this new style at all, and I don't quite get how the new lists I generate from, say, my reading textbook will mesh with the existing queue. Do the words just all get added to the queue automatically now, or is there something I'm missing that I need to do? I'm looking through the stuff on the new system now, but without trying to sound overly cranky, I just want to come to the site and study Chinese, not waste time messing around with changes in a system that I previously knew how to navigate without any issues. I'm not really crazy about the, "Well, we wanted to encourage everyone to use Skritter in such-and-such a way" argument, either; ultimately, Skritter is one of several tools I use to study Chinese. I'll use it in whatever way works best for me, be that studying by sections, whole lists or whatever. I don't need the software dictating to me the "best" way to study.

I don't use Chrome and don't plan on switching browsers just to accommodate this change, so the extension workaround isn't really an option for me.

That said, I'm really pleased to hear about the plans for an iPhone app! I've been increasingly pushed toward RapidRote lately because of their iPhone app; hopefully I won't need to make the switch now.

I'm not familiar with RapidRote. Is it like Anki or Mnemosyne?

Sorry, RapidRote is the institutional version of a program called Byki. They have two versions, one for your computer (Mac or PC) and one for your iPhone. There may be an Android version too; I don't have an Android phone, so I've never checked it out. With the phone app, you download specific vocab lists so you can review them online or offline, but if you want the option to create lists and upload them yourself, you have to buy the desktop version of Byki, as well (it's about $50)

I'm in a job where a lot of people are doing intensive language training, and RapidRote is one of the tools they have in the language labs to help people study. It works with a bunch of languages, not just Chinese or Japanese. Not a bad program, but I was using Skritter for Japanese before I started studying Chinese, and I like that it's geared specifically toward Asian languages, has the writing option, et cetera.

What I think Byki has over Skritter is the option to go from English to the target language, as opposed to vice versa. As I've been Skrittering, I've found that my character recall and ability to parse things from Chinese to English are pretty good, but coming up with the right words to go from English to Chinese is significantly harder. I think part of it is because when I Skritter, it's basically all from Chinese to English and not the other way around. So I think I'm going to break down and shell out the money for Byki just to fill in that gap.

Interesting. I use Anki for that, myself. Here's a thread where people compare Byki to Anki (which is free):

http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=18857&PN=10

I am a big believer in active learning (i.e. you need to say or write or type something) and sentences, so I use Anki for FL->SL (first to second language) practice as well as SL->FL reading practice. Skritter isn't really set up for phrases, although I've put a lot of long figures of speech into the DB and they work fairly well.

James