I had to go a work trip for about a week, and when I got back I had 400 items to review or something. I used the "save me" feature, but it's been really hard to catch back up. Discouragingly hard. Any suggestions either on a technincal level or otherwise?

Discouragement is all in your head. Sit and work at it every day and after a couple of days you'll catch up.

James

I take one day off and it says 400. I'm not sure what I'm going to do once my intensive class is over. Seriously!

Hm, i do see what you mean. I would be nice if there was a maximum limit so that if you go on a trip or life happens it doesn't feel like you are being punished when you return? What do you think Skritter guys? One must be challanged and a standard must be kept for learning this crazy language. This for sure is not French or Spanish... But, you don't want to get too overwhelmed and discouraged.
JB: follow jww1066's advice and kick but for 2 days. If you are still in the gutter let us know.

p.s. You can always turn your daily goal down before a trip. Would that keep keep a lest some numbers down from new characters?

I have regular hiatuses and come back to 500+ items to review. It seems like a lot, but generally I can get them all cleared in three days, two if I apply myself.

If you find you're forgetting many characters, I find that looking up new characters' structure on zhongwen.com or yellowbridge.com greatly aids retention.

James

What seems to work for me is to stop adding words 1-2 weeks before going on holiday or a business trip. In the last week being away the objective is to daily bring down the "ready percentages" as much as possible. This resulted in a 250ish review queue after being away for 8 days.

"In the last week being away" should be "In the last week before being away".

I can offer a number of suggestions, but am still not sure what the best thing is.

Probably the most efficient would be to do what mw suggests, if you know you're going somewhere. Pause your lists so that you're not going to be adding new items. Then you'll be "overpracticing": practicing things before they become due. You can clear most of the long-term items that would have become due that week, and only the short-term ones (many of which you are probably going to forget no matter what) will be waiting when you get back.

Using "Save Me" is only advised if you're really feeling down about not getting anything new, or a big pile of stuff is too easy and you want to manually push it back. Using it will make it take longer to get back to normal levels of due items per day. So you get to learn more new stuff, but catching up is harder.

One thing you could try is to go really fast through the huge review queue the first time, skipping everything as soon as you can determine whether you know it or not. Then after that's done, you can slow down and start focusing on relearning the ones you've forgotten.

Speed is probably a big part of any of it. How long does it usually take to review 400 items? I hadn't practiced for two days and just had 216 items to review, so as a test I did some quick practice: it took 8:55 to get it down to 100 items. That's with writing everything (although there were a bunch of tones in there).

It is a tough problem. One thing we can do is keeping making Skritter better so that things stick easier, practice goes faster, and scheduling is smarter. Improvements in those areas will go a long way toward making it easy to catch up, because you'll need less review time overall.

But at a certain level, items that get overdue just gotta be studied or forgotten. So we can't stop reviews from accumulating if you go on a trip. I guess one option is to let you tell Skritter to automatically ignore all items that are most likely to be forgotten, so that those can just be re-added when you have time, rather than trying to save all of them. Hmm, that's an interesting idea. What would you guys think of that? I will also discuss within the base.

Thanks for the suggestions guys, and thanks for the explanation Nick. It's my last couple hours before the work week starts again, so I'm gonna make an effort to buckle down and catch up!

It would be nice to have some sort of "vacation" feature that would help in a situation like this. However, from what I'm hearing it seems kind of complicated.

Well, time to get to work...

Hm. I got back from a trip yesterday and found 1670 items waiting for me...

How to catch up:

Stay off the forums and go directly to the practice page?

:o)

For the record: It took 4.5 hours (Skritter count) to cut the number down to about 70 - and now new items are appearing again. I am back in the green.

(I have to admit that I haven"t done much else the last two days for various reasons...).

Part of it, for me, is that I don't "feel" like I'm learning unless I add new words to my queue. Now, my rational side says that's garbage - learning something new and forgetting it is worse than reinforcing something I kind of know and would otherwise forget.

It might be worthwhile to have the system add a word at 1/2 hour or so of studying just so people 'feel' the progress (on the default 'add a new word' rate mode). You might also want the review queue to not decrease when you get something wrong (it is a bit discouraging to have 11 left and then the system catches up with the 10 you got wrong and you're up to 21 and then in the time it takes you have some words that are up for review again....)

I like the idea of adding in at least one word every half an hour. I will see if I can work that into the next round of the Genius adding algorithm.

Cool - Thx!