Hi all!

New user - please be gentle! But first, I have to say that I'm in love with this app - such a great find! Well done to the guys developing Skritter!

I'm trying to understand how the items due is calculated, how the word frequency is calculated, and what (if anything) the relationship between the two is.

I study about an hour a day, in 20 minute sessions, sometimes a bit more if I find myself with idle (public transport delays, etc). I would like to let Skritter handle the addition, but I always find it too fast, or at least too many words for the amount of time I have.

For example, this morning I switched it back to "slow", and within 10 minutes, Skritter added 18 characters/words. Looking at my Items due, I have:

Now: 3

Wednesday: 65
Thursday: 12
Friday: 5
Saturday: 8
Sunday: 3

93 items due over the next five days. That is more than 100 per week, much more than I can cope with.

How does Skritter work out how many words/characters per day/per week should be added? And how does it work out how to space the words? I would much prefer them to be added as spread out as possible, rather than have the day's allocation dumped on me in a matter of minutes.


I've read just about everything posted in the forums over the last few months and searched the rest, and it seems most people want to speed things up, while I want to slow it down. The nearest I found to this being addressed was in this thread:

http://www.skritter.com/forum/topic?id=229256404&comments=7

Thanks!

Hi there!

Welcome to Skritter :)

I think in general the auto-add function is way too excessive. Like you say, once you reach 0 pending reviews, it just keeps hammering new chars into your vocab, sometimes even earlier. I remember when I once had like 20 or 30 left (after 1 hours of getting through my pending reviews) it suddenly went AMOK and added even more on top of the ones I had left.

In the end I stopped auto-add and every now and then I add manually 5-10 characters.

Is "items pending" the same as reviews? I assumed reviews to be reviewing the characters that I already know, i.e. have done the writing, tone, pinyin and definition correctly several times.

what is a char?

I also only use manual add. Personally, I cannot see any benefit to letting Skritter auto-add.

notfromhere, when you add a word, Skritter will test you on one part only, for example writing. Skritter will wait to show the you other parts of that word (definition, tone, pinyin) until some fixed amount of time later. I am not too clear on the exact scheduling of this part, but I am clear that adding a new word now also means new parts of the same word later. Also, since new items take a lot of re-reviews over the short-term consider my advice: Do not add new words without considering your available study time over the next week. Also, do not add new words if you cannot clear your "reviews due" on a regular basis.