Feel like Skritter keeps showing the same words over and over again

So I just started using Skritter and I’m on the 2.0 version studying only reading part of Chinese characters. I’m using a list from the Tuttle book. The strange thing to me is that it seems that Skritter is testing me over and over and over again on the same words. For example, today, I’ve been studying for half an hour, and I think I’ve seen ren, ta, and tamen about 5 times each already. What’s going on with the spaced repetition feature?

Yes, something is definitely wrong. It looks like what’s happening is that Skritter is continually quizzing me on the same words over and over again and then updating the “next quiz date” of the words, without actually waiting until the next quiz date when deciding when to quiz me on a given word. So I’ve got some words whose next quiz date is something like a month out even thought I’ve only started learning these words today (because it’s been testing me over and over on them already). I’ve put up a screenshot of what my words list looks like after 30 minutes of studying today.

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It looks like there’s an open issue for this (#370). The development team is currently working on things in the backend which should fix the issue. In the meantime you can use the legacy version where this won’t happen, at: https://legacy.skritter.com

I just switched back to the old app on Android (after using beta for more than a month) and I feel back on track: no repetition of the same words again and again, I can add new ones and everything is fast and smooth. By the way, the claims about the strokes recognition system being the same (if I remember right, somebody from the team was saying it) are evidently not true, even if the core code is the same, something else influences it, because in the old it feels much smoother and faster (like taking an ink pen after using a pencil).

Sorry, I know that you are putting a lot of effort in the new beta, but it’s not ready yet to replace the old app for the everyday practice.

As was discussed elsewhere, if there a was a way to install both versions (an apk?), I would gladly test beta, while also using the old app.

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No, there isn’t a way to have both the beta and prod version installed at the same time on a single device because they share the same app id com.inkren.skritter.chinese and com.inkren.skritter.japanese. The core code for the recognition is the same, but it appears the way the DOM is getting updated in the new version is causing things to render slower than normal. It’s not the easiest of fixes in terms of time, but we’re going to try using a different library to render things to the DOM on the study screen.

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This issues is definitely showing up in the legacy version as well. I used it again tonight and it keeps trying to test the same words on me, without adding new vocab. This is really frustrating.

I’m facing the same problem. Some words are on my review list but Skritter 2.0 keeps asking me about the other ones that are sceduled in the future. Any hope this will be fixed soon?

@johnguiscool: It looks like you had it set in review-only, so I’ve disabled review only mode and you should be able to add new words now!

@R4T10: Do you mean that words were skipped adding in a list, and started adding words from farther ahead in the list? If so, what’s the lists name?

No it’s more that a lot of words are listed as “ready” when I look into the Words tab but they never get asked during stuying my “due” items. Instead some other words not listed as “ready” keep showing up again and again, mostly words I added recently but already studied a few times. Even if none of the new words is listed as “ready” (but the others are) plus reloading the page they will not be asked. On my Android device it works fine (as far as I can tell) but I want to use Skritter 2.0. I hope I explained that well.
And it seems like that prevents new words from being added, since I always have to do that manually - or is that always so? I’m new here :slight_smile:

And now everything crashed and I get an error “Error fetching items. Please refresh the page.”. Refresh, clearing cache, reboot, nothing works :frowning: so sad, I love this website…

I’m running into the same issue on 2.0. Reviews go in a cycle, not bringing up items that are due at first. I don’t have this issue on iOS.

I’ve been logging into the iOS app, doing the reviews that are due, and then going on the site to add mnemonics and strengthen recall.

Hope it gets fixed soon. Definitely prefer the site to the mobile app.

@R4T10 @supernerd660 We’re working on tracking down and fixing this. In the meantime I recommend you guys use the legacy site instead, at: http://legacy.skritter.com

@R4T10 Would you be able to paste some words that showed as “ready”, but aren’t popping up when you study? New words should automatically add if your pending items to review number is low, (as long as you have automatic word adding enabled, which is enabled by default)

I also found that using the html5 site I got items repeating again and again. Moving back to the legacy site fixed the issue. Any update on when this will be fixed on the new site?

It affects all the words I added when I started using Skritter, since I’m new that was already version 2.0.
When I started my learning experince Skritter added word automatically and everything was fine. After a while Skritter seemed to stop adding new words automatically and kept asking me exactly the words that are now listed as ready but wont be asked. Words like 男, 弟弟, 要, 咖啡. This went on for hours and I wondered why there are no new words to study. Maybe I messed with the time intervall by repeating those items very very often during that bug. So now these items have been listed as ready for a week already and I have to add words manually because the rate of new words is too low.
I’ve been using my Android device (old version) to add a whole bunch of new words at once recently because it’s just too slow for me, I already know a lot of the characters already.

We’re actively tackling this and have a battle plan. It looks like there isn’t any study data on your account to get a better picture of what might be going on with your account specifically. Have you recently reset your progress?

I decided to reset after reading posts by ultra users who only focus on writing. In future, after this bug has been resolved I’ll start again and only focus on writing. Also I don’t want to do tone practice for instance because living in Taiwan I have to be careful about tones, so I’ll figure out a way to study those elsewhere.

I had a similar experience this morning when using the new interface. What the culprit was was bad internet connection. I got the same word then it (presumably) failed to update my study status so I got sort of the same words again, then it (presumably) failed to update my study status and I got “sort of the same words again”.

I noticed how my queue length was always 136 when I started despite studying several words each time.

Not sure if this is helpful but seems the new interface require constant internet connection to work correctly and any connection errors are silently ignored in the background.

Today I spent a long time looking at the console output in the Developer Tools of Firefox. First I blocked all those words that are “stuck” (probably some other issue) to make sure Skritter can add new words again. So I had 0 items to review and clicked on Study. The part of the code that adds new words seems to be working because immediately there was a new word added to my pending items. BUT Skritter fetches a 50 items long list from https://api.skritter.com/v2/queue/next?languageCode=zh&limit=50&lists=&parts=rune|tone|rdng|defn&sections=&styles=both|simp|trad which are the next 50 items to be studied. So the user has to work through all 50 items (probably ones that he already studied many times and are not even on the user’s review list) before Skritter fetches a new Array of 50 items and finally displays new words and the learning experience can continue. In this long list there are no duplicates allowed as far as I can tell.
50 items is a long time! It takes me about 15 minutes. A quick fix might be to set this value to a lower value. It was probably raised to reduce lag caused by fetching the list - it takes a few seconds to load a new one. Hope this was helpful.

I’ve just pushed a fix we’ve been working on live that inserts newly added items to the top of the queue. The reason for the long fetch of items is to try and prevent the duplicate issue people have been reporting and also so that we can start preloading other item related resources.