I think it would be cool with some sort of a score list, where all users could be ranked by known characters, time studied and other stuff like that. Since all this information is available anyway, it would just be fun to see how you compare to other users.

It's on the list! We've had leaderboards on our list of things to do for some time, along with an achievement/badge system. The profiles are actually a precursor to that; I hope to get to the others later this year.

Nice! I cant wait for all the upcoming cool changes! You guys are doing a great job!

Can we be in different goal groups? Like maybe cohorts?

I don't want to go up against people who live in China, or someone who is up against their 6,000th character.

We could consider something like that. How exactly would you want to split people by? Country? Number of characters known? Or by groups you manually join?

We won't just be doing leaderboards for all time though. There will also be for shorter periods of time, like maybe in the past week or in the past month. So if you're learning lots of new characters you'll probably be doing better than those who already know most of the ones they need!

I don't really like leaderboards at all. From my experience, they just make me feel bad about myself because there will always be insane super players that are at the top that you can never beat. They bring a feeling of hopelessness, and often inflict a "why even try" attitude. I'm sure I'm not alone in this.

If you implement them, please make sure we can hide them from all the main pages if we want. I don't want to compete with other people, I'd rather just compete with myself.

Scott, one could split up in categories like: Newbie, Elementary, Intermediate, Upper Intermediate, Advanced and Professional.
In a first step, every user could rank him/herself in the profile. In a second step, users could be automatically rated based on the number of characters and/or words (including retention rate) as well as what kind of characters they have learnt.
E.g. a user, who has learned 500 characters might be classified as Elementary, however, if these 500 characters all fall into the categories hard & hardest, this user might then be re-classified to Advanced.
In addition, this could give users also some motivation to study hard in order to reach the next level. You could even give users a "gap analysis" to let them know, how much more they have to study in order to reach the next level. For example:
Your are on Intermediate Level. In order to reach Upper Intermediate, you should learn
- 185 new characters,
- 562 new words,
- increase your average retention rate from 87 to 92%
or a mix out of this 3 measures.
This would lead people competing more against themselves instead of comparing to others. Today's statistics is based on "history", but this kind of statistics would indicate the user, what to do in the future and give them a target.
Just my thought, don't know, how others think about that and how much work this would mean to you.

I really like Rolands idea!

@Lawnmower16: I think such stats are motivating for some, demotivating for others, though I don't really have any evidence to back up that assertion. Either way, we won't force competitiveness, and you will be able to take yourself out of the rankings with the private account option. We haven't gotten to any specifics like where the data will go or how much, if any, will show up on the home page, but when we get to that we'll be happy to get everyone's input then!

I like Roland's idea too, where you compete against yourself to level up your knowledge ranking, and you're encouraged by how much more exp, I mean, words or characters you need to learn to get to the next category. Will put this on the list!

@scott - I really want deeper stats. Not for some juvenile competitive reason, but because I want to get better at this. This month I studied practically every day for an hour, but even at a beginner level, I was only able to basically learn 3 words per hour. I read your email every month and see the top performers and can quickly see that these people seem to be (at least on the surface) learning much more effectively than I am. Instead of being frustrated or hopeless, I am dying to know what they are doing "right"? I noticed one user spent 68 hours and learned 1200+ characters? Thats enough characters to pass the HSK level 1.

Don't read stats like that;-) As pointed out before, you do not know what they have been doing. I do for example regularly nuke my account and then when i start again I can add maybe 100 characters per hour. Looks nice but it is not reflecting the time it have taken to really learn them in the first place. I do as well learn some 3 characters per hour normally and I think that this is rather "average". Then is also the question what is to learn. Do we remember them next day, next month etc or not. Stats do not tell you much about that but it gives guidelines. It would however be nice to get more info about how people learn. There are many things once can do to speed it up, e.g. trying to build it up from radicals, words that have the same parts, build mnemonics, create mind pictures and much more. What works for me is to "live" Chinese. Use Chinese in my daily life, I am not using a computer, I am using a 电脑, I am not calling my friend 我给我的朋友打电话。etc. Even at work i terrorize my Japanese colleagues by speaking Chinese. Well, my Japanese sucks and so do their English so this is better.

Da xia - I just scraped into the 'top rankings' last month - but I have been doing scritter less than two months. I learned Mandarin 30 years ago - the running dogs of capitalism etc.. so much of my 'progress' has been review from ancient times which has been much quicker than I expected but I certainly won't be able to sustain it. I need to scritter less now and get to grips with grammar that I never really understood because we had no good book with explanations - though a requirement to stand up and recite the text, picking up where the previous student left off, actually created a great 'feel' for the language. Everybody comes to scritter with such different backgrounds, I think it will be hard to discern from the scritter stats what 'works' best - people's aims are so different too. I can't imagine myself learning characters without a context but I think some people do.

More than stats, I find that this forum itself is one of the most helpful places for getting learning tips and encouragement. For instance, after having studied quite a while, I decided to add definition practice and dumped a couple thousand characters I knew otherwise into definition. I ended up with a 4000 plus back-up that I simply could not conquer. Then I read one of Mandarinboy's forum entries stating that he nukes his list regularly. I took heart and went the nuke route. This would show up strangely on stats -- better than average speed of learning and low character/word count compared to what I know -- but it has solidified my learning of basic characters. It has also made Skritter character practice fun again.

@jameshritz I have a similar curiosity about those super-fast learners. As mandarinboy points out, nuking can explain some of them. Others are not starting from zero; maybe they were already advanced in Chinese when they started, and Skritter is just catching up to reflect their actual levels of knowledge. I would even include in this category those who have a background only in spoken Chinese, as they would have pre-existing memories to connect with characters and words that they learn.

I suspect that, all other things being equal, those who are Skrittering in a Chinese-language immersion environment will learn much faster than those who are not, because they are getting passive stimulation every time they see some Chinese text and are reinforcing memories every time they hear or speak Chinese. But there are probably many other interesting effects that the Skritter guys could derive from their data. They did mention at one point that a lot of people who learned lots of characters really quickly had been using Heisig.

James

Mandarinboy is right, the stats do not really reflect, the speed of learning characters. Click on my name to see my stats. 1103 characters and 929 words in just 31 hours may look impressive first, but I am already an advanced learner, and am living in China for almost 6 years, so actually I know more words and characters, but I am already learning them for years and not just for 31 hours...

I go with jww1066:s suggestion for Heisig to learn characters quickly. The only problem with that is that it is just characters/words. At least for me i need to have context. Not much use of 1000+ characters if I can't use them. For me it works to add new words containing the new character from Chinesepod. If i have the same character in two or three words i reinforce that character much better. I can then also study the sentences etc they use at Chinesepod. The words I do know I regularly export and run in my own tool that parses one line Chinese newspapers after articles where i know more than e.g 50% of the words. That gives context. For the words in the article I do not know i add the one I feel important or just fun. Skritters booklet is perfect for that. Also yellow bridge decomposition tool is helpful. There you can search for characters containing the character you just learned. The key is to find the solution that works for you and your way of learning. My daughter ( 6 years) just immerse the characters. She sees them as beautiful pictures and her description of what they looks like are absolutely fantastic. She can easily learn 10 new characters in an hour while I at the most can reach 3 or 4. The biggest difference is that she do not spend any time to think about the character. She just look at the funny looking picture and remembers it as a picture. I on the other hand needs context, understand the radicals, meanings etc. This makes it is slower to start with but it helps later on since your base knowledge are greater, new character will be easier and easier to learn. After all, There are a very limited number of possible combinations of strokes and radicals that do build up the majority of the characters. Once you learned all the basics, new characters are just a matter of remembering the combination of them. Nice mnemonics do the trick there. At least I do find it easier to remember an fun mnemonic than the actual full character. Just find your way and you will pick up speed. Happy learning:-)