Below is a summary of where I’m at with Skritter, partly as a note to self, partly because I thought it might be of interest for people starting out with Skritter to have an idea of a possible end goal and what it’s taken for me to get there with the majority of my Chinese study being with Skritter. Sometime last year I posted on a similar subject regarding what happens next after Skritter, but it’s taken me rather longer than I expected to get my Skrittering to a point where I’m thinking about this again. It’s a long stream of consciousness, so please feel free to skip if not of interest. The amount of time I put into Chinese it’s hard not to get a bit analytical about it from time to time.
Skritter has been an amazing tool to help with Chinese and I doubt I would have made it as far as I have without it. There’s still a long way to go, but Skritter has been an enormous help in laying a solid foundation in characters and pronunciation over the several years I’ve been using it. Big thanks to the Skritter team for all your hard work over the years.
I passed the 10k word mark around midnight on the 31st of December last year. I only study writing / tones and not definitions / readings, mainly because I started Skritter before the latter two existed and never picked them up. I’ve mostly finished all the big lists I wanted to study (e.g. Chinese movie word frequency lists 1-5000, TOCFL 2013, All HSK lists, Top 3000 Characters, Mandarin Idioms, Place Names, “Chinese People, one should know”), and various other small ones.
After finishing the lists I was up to around 13,000 words learned. My technique was to add words a 100 at a time for maximum efficiency, then clear out the review and add another 100. This is because adding the words one-by-one can be quite slow if you add a lot of overlapping lists, as Skritter needs to search for individual gaps when you’ve already studied many of the surrounding items.
For the last six months or so I’ve been gradually chipping away at the review queue, without adding any new characters or words. This has gone from around 6,000 items to review at peak to around 3,000 now. If I consistently do around an hour a day, it drifts downwards, if I do much less than that it goes up pretty quickly.
Skritter says there are >16,000 items to review coming up in the next 8 weeks. Today’s stats are 67 minutes, 1207 studied, 1 learned. So 16,000 items is around 16 hours worth, excluding repeats due to errors and rescheduling. It’s a few hundred new items a day at the moment, and down to around a couple of hundred at the end of the eight weeks.
Skritter has been my main study method for quite a while, I do occasionally read, watch movies and join in conversations in Chinese, but mostly just study Skritter when I have free time. This has left me in a good position when reading, but weaker conversationally and when producing written text.
Towards the end of this year if all goes well, I’ll hopefully have the queue under control, and might even start adding a few more items. I’m a bit surprised having gone through those lists how often I see new characters and words when reading newspapers or other native level materials. A short article will often have three or four new words or characters at the moment to add into Skritter. I’ve also got a lot of starred items to review for various reasons, for example chengyu that I don’t fully understand, or neutral tones and sandhi that I want to double check.
I expect with reviews and eventually adding a few new characters, I’ll still need to keep about an hour a day in Skritter to maintain my level and keep up with new material I find. That’s basically what I can do on commute twice a day and a little in the day time in breaks. However I expect as the time goes down in Skritter, I’ll naturally have more time to start exposing myself to more native level materials. I’m also planning to start taking some classes again.
As of now, my total stats are 1114 days studied, 1171.7 hours, retention 89.1%. Real time is undoubtably a lot more than that, as Skritter time is somewhat compressed. I’d guesstimate that other exposure to Chinese (e.g. classes, reading, dictionary work, conversations, movies, podcasts) as well as the additional time studying Skritter not captured in the number above, the real study time is somewhere between 500 and 1000 hours more, i.e. around 1,800 to 2,300 hours.
Added / Learned (why is this higher than added?) / Reviews / Retention are as below:
Character Writings: 4685, 4790, 396410, 92.3%
Character Tones: 3840, 3926, 234218, 94.1%
Word Writings: 13230, 13689, 158665, 77.1%
Word Tones: 12094, 12384, 92454, 81.7%
I target 87.5% retention, the lowest possible setting, for maximum efficiency. I expect word retention will drift up if I keep practising and clear the review backlog. To end of September Skritter says I have studied 350/365 days (532 hours), so even though I’ve been using Skritter since 2009, about half of my study has been in the last year.
As I’m assuming the character writings make up the word writings, I guess that’s around 400k characters written and 230k characters toned, or around 600 reviews per hour which sounds about right. You can see the value of the tool here - a 1% drop in review efficiency (e.g. if the app glitches for a second or two every couple of minutes), and that’s more than a full working day of study extra needed over the course of getting to the final 13,000 or so words in Skritter. Without Skritter the efficiency would I’m sure be much lower, so it really is saving several days of time if you’re serious about getting to a high level with Chinese.
13,000 words is enough to make good headway through most day-to-day reading materials. With the number of characters I have, it’s quite unusual for me to see a word or character that I really can’t make a good educated guess at with context. Certainly enough to get the gist of everyday reading materials without a dictionary, although I still miss out on some nuances. My reading speed is also not too fast, and I am often not confident choosing a word with the correct and idiomatic meaning to use when speaking or writing.
If I look through the Skritter vocabulary lists, there are many words I still haven’t covered (how many words are there in Skritter? it must be a large number), but I feel most of these are ones I’ll be able to pick up relatively easily passively. They’re not a priority to learn for me at the moment.
All-in-all I expect to keep using Skritter for a while longer for retention and review, but that I’ll need to try to find more diverse ways to keep moving forward with Chinese. I’m not too hopeful to find something as efficient for studying as Skritter for other aspects of studying Chinese. I do hope to improve rapidly in many of the areas such as speaking and writing texts that have been relatively neglected through focusing on Skritter as my main means of revision and learning new vocabulary.
