I was wondering how big the total user base of Skritter is, like how many active subscribers are there, in case anyone has an approximate figure.

The reason is that I much to my great surprise ended up topping that "Top Skritter Learners of All Time" list that went out in the newsletter, at least for Characters learned. I know I've been all nerdy about learning Chinese lately, but I always thought there were far greater nerds out there. So I'm just curious what the scale of the crowd I'm competing with here is.

Neeerrrrrdd

When you factor in users studying traditional characters or Japanese, I'd say Skritter has well over a dozen users.

I have no idea about the user base, but wanted to congratulate you on topping the list and reaching over 6000 characters! What's your retention rate? What's your ratio of Skrittering towards studying other parts of Chinese?

I think there are more than a dozen users. I would say its upwards to 75-150.

Humus: how many hours per day do you study? Do you work? Whats the secret to your cray? Share the beans! I can barley get in 45 minutes, because I always have to lesson plan 備課!!!

I hope you're kidding when you say 150 users. There are 150 studying one of my lists alone. Also, the stats indicated that last month alone 18,983 hours were spent studying on Skritter and 13,000,000 items were studied. Doing some basic math that's 125 hours or so per person for the month, which (since Skritter time is much slower than real time) is at least 200 hours per person...on average. Given that many probably didn't study at all, that's more time than I worked and slept combined.

xiaokaka, thanks, I have a retention rate of 91.1%. So that roughly matches the 92% I've configured Skritter towards (95% being the default). I've also configured it to fast add. Not entirely sure how these two interact, but I guess at least I've optimized for quantity over in-depth learning. And of course, it sure helped that I suddenly about a month ago decide to learn traditional as well, so the last month alone I've learn 1400 character (although barely any new words). It's actually quite easy to learn if you already know the simplified characters. Without that I would still be at about 5000 and would've ended up a couple of places down on the list.

So I guess my weakness is that I've been Skrittering too much and way too little other learning. Having a Chinese wife helps with my listening comprehension, which I think is decent, but I can barely speak any myself. I just finished my first book in Chinese, which is one of those books with one side in Chinese and the other in English, so that I don't lose the context when the Chinese gets too difficult. I still struggle with newspapers and can absolutely not follow the subtitles in movies or TV in real-time. As for formal education, I took a beginner course for a year at half-speed, which ended last summer. After that I haven't had anything formal, unfortunately. The university didn't offer anything after that at nighttime, so to continue I'd have to do daytime fulltime studies, which of course doesn't work with having a job, so it's been all self-studies since then, which mostly consists of Skritter on the subway and during lunch.

klooste, so my stats are 571 hours over 480 days, so like 1h10m per day on average. I have about 2 x 25min subway to work, and then I usually Skritter over my lunchbox as well, so perhaps 1.5h on a typical weekday, and less on weekends. But I keep a fairly consistent rate and barely have any long-term breaks from Skritter. I guess that's the secret. This news took me by surprise since I haven't ever appeared on any "top learners this month" stats, so I guess my consistency paid off in the long-term instead.

re. struggling with newspapers: You know a lot of characters relative to words. If you read a good newspaper - say 明报 - from cover-to-cover then I imagine you'd only encounter one or two new characters. But you'd meet hundreds of new words. Of course, the meaning of words is much easier to guess than that of characters, but it will still be a hurdle.

How about yourself Kryby? You seem to know quite a lot of words. How do you go when you read a newspaper? :)

hey guys, I just missed out on the newsletter top learners this month, by an hour!
I was getting at least an hour a day, and a few days of 2 hours, 2.5 hours and 3 hours.
The funny thing is that I was at work for my best study period!
At work I do 12 hour shift as a chef on a ship (building wind farms in Denmark) I work 4 weeks on 4 weeks off, and I would do maybe 10 mins skritter time before work in tea shack. then at 0930 i have 30 mins break (10-15mins skritter time)
1130 break same again
1300 break until sometime 3pm (lots of skrittering)
1530 break again more time
1800 break again
1930 finish work, shower, watch a movie and skritter in bed until sleepy!

Its amazing how much I could do! HSK 1,2 and nearly finished 3 and also all the radicals.
No heres the problem, Im at home now, i.e Ive got a 4 year old, hardly any skritter time!

Just have to wait until work again in a few weeks.
I suggested to Nick about the Best of all time skritterers, Im happy he did it!

Now im really struggling to remember what Ive learned!

neeerds :S

I need to beat these guys in the next year :/

^ DO another insane challenge吧?

Kryby, you're absolutely right. One thing that has sort of skewed my learning towards characters (besides my recent forays into traditional) is that I found not knowing a character to be a bigger stumbling block than not knowing a particular word. Once you know all characters, it's quick to look something up in Pleco with pinyin, whereas drawing an unknown character takes longer. Or even if you're unsure about the definition, but know the pinyin (I find remembering pinyin and tone to be very easy, but definition much harder). I guess there's also a psychological effect of encountering unknown characters that make me feel like the text is above my level, whereas an unfamiliar word may does not to the same extent. But maybe that's just me.

Klooste, since I came back from China and regular school started I don't have that much time to dedicate to skritter :(.
Hopefuly on summer vacations I'll start another insane challenge.

@joeymac1981: newspapers are fine when I'm reading for information, but in any day there are still dozens of words and chengyus - chengyus usually in op-eds - that I haven't seen before. It's always hard to say how many words educated native speakers are comfortable with, but its going to be at least 25000, I would imagine. I'll let you know when I can read 明報 as quickly as I can read the NYT...

how do you guys that overdose characters decide on which ones to add?

In the beginning I just picked random lists that I thought were interesting. Later I got a bit more organized and tried to patch up the holes in my knowledge by choosing lists like "top 1000 words in movie titles", "top 1000 words in newspapers" etc. The number of characters simply kept ticking up with the word count. At some point around 2500 characters or so the curve kind of flattened, but I still felt I constantly encountered characters I didn't know. So that's when I took on lists like "most common 4500 characters". So I guess the strategy in the end for me was "all of them".

Back to the original question, on the lists page it says that 20001 - 50000 users are studying Skritter Chinese 101. Not very precise, but at least a ballpark. The HSK lists have 5000 - 10000 users each which might give a better indication?