I usually have about 40 to 45 minutes a day at this point studying Chinese. I like to break up that time studying from the Skritter app, but also from a textbook that I have which I feel really helps contextualize what I’m learning. It also helps me with other aspects like grammar through simulated conversation. If I have time I’ll get 10-15 minutes extra of study time by watching Chinese learning videos on YouTube later in the day while I eat lunch or something.
The big issue I’m having is that the workload on the daily item list for Skritter has really ballooned. Sometimes I’m asked to review 35-50 items in a day. And that is just really too much for the time I have allotted I feel. I’ve been doing this for a little while now consistently, and I just feel like I’m not going much anywhere. I just changed the retention rate from it’s highest listed setting to it’s lowest at 87%. I’m hoping that will give me less items to review daily. I’ve heard that it won’t necessarily help my memorization of a broader amount of items though. However I feel that since I’m studying from other sources, and I only have a certain amount of time per day this may be the best option right now. Besides like I was hinting at, I feel like I wasn’t going much anywhere. I know about 330 characters with 180 words learned. Haven’t miss a study day in 25 days. I want to eventually be able to have conversational level Chinese while knowing about 1000 characters. At this rate though I’m not sure how long it will take to get there, or if I’ll even make a lot of progress in a year’s time.
If you have any advice for my situation I’d greatly appreciate it. Thanks.
Setting your retention rate will generate less reviews, so that’s a good tactic if you aren’t wanting as many reviews, however it will mean you’ll remember them less consistently and it does take a bit of time to fully take effect. I recommend committing a certain amount of time to Skritter each day, say 15 or 20 minutes, and as long as you stick with that, the reviews should balance out and become consistent. The reason why more reviews would start coming in is from studying more in the past, and then less recently, where they’re allowed to build up from more items being scheduled in the past versus how many are being consistently reviewed, so another good idea might be to temporarily disable automatic word adding until the queue is more manageable.
I definitely disabled the auto word adding a little while ago. Every time I use the Skritter app on my phone I try to review all the items I’m supposed to for that session. It can be frustrating when the stack just gets too high for more than the 20 minutes or so I can spend. I do wish Skritter had an option where as a user you can set a certain amount of card reviews per day and have the SRS work within that boundary instead of having it simply decide for you how many cards you have to study for that session and not taking into account time constraints.
So did you mean to stick to 15 to 20 minutes per session/day with the retention rate set at 87%? Because that is what I’m trying for now to see how well it works out.
This should do the trick! You can also check out how many reviews are scheduled for the next 8 weeks to get an idea of how many are due, at: Skritter | Log In
(first click the “(click to calculate)” text on the right hand side, and then click on the calendar to pull up the full 8 week chart)
So I’ve done this, and still I’ve been seeing like 35 to sometimes 50 cards per day. I’m lucky if I get below 25. It’s not working, and I simply don’t have the time to sit there for 30 minutes reviewing cards every day when I only have about 40 minutes to study Chinese and I’d like to do other things than flash card review. Why weren’t time constraints one of the first things the developers thought about when putting this together?
EDIT: Okay I’ve noticed goal mode. I don’t remember that from before. Is this new? Will this give me a set limit over the cards I study per day? Because that’s what I was looking for. When I turned it on though and looked at the prediction of reviews for the next five days it’s all over 38 (tomorrow is 66!), with 42 due now. On the fifth day for the prediction it says 25, but I don’t know if that will stay at 25 indefinitely.
Just to reiterate I use Android for Skritter. So the changes I make on the website settings will work on my Android version right? I know that sounds like a dumb question, but I’m really just trying to get this sorted out to a reasonable preference for myself without having to keep coming back here over and over again.
This isn’t new for the client you’re using, however it is being implemented into the 2.0 version (and isn’t available on 2.0 yet).
“Save me” spaces out the due reviews scheduling into chunks, where goal mode shows you what you’re personal goal is for the day without affecting scheduling, so if you want to break them into chunks, I recommend using the Save Me feature at: Skritter | Log In[quote=“PapaShogun, post:5, topic:1903”]
Just to reiterate I use Android for Skritter. So the changes I make on the website settings will work on my Android version right? I know that sounds like a dumb question,
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That’s actually not a dumb question! That’s a large reason why we’re working on unifying the clients. Some settings changed on the web will carry over to the Android app (account wide settings), versus things like Filters on the Android app which don’t carry over to the web, etc. In the future we’re trying to ensure that any setting you change on any device carries over if you switch to another device.
Okay perhaps I’ll try “save me” mode. Because I’m essentially at my wit’s end with Skritter I had to say. I only have about 45 minutes per day to study Chinese, and I simply can’t spend the entire time going through 50-60 flash cards for characters on a daily basis. It isn’t making the process fun, and it’s starting to become a chore just to get things done instead of a positive learning experience. It’s cool that Skritter does have my textbook that I’ve been using, and I am a fan of the spaced repetition, but there has to be time conscious limits for users.
Hate to ask, but are there any similar apps or software out there that will actually help me in the regard I’m aiming for? I heard Pleco has something similar, but suffers from the same problem that Skritter does. Heard about Anki, so maybe I can give that a try. Once Skritter gets better I can maybe return.
Is that decision final? I like the current situation where you can set filters individually for every device, e.g. on my smartphone I study writing, tones and meaning and on my desktop I study meaning and pinyin. I won’t ever study writing on my laptop and I prefer be able to type the pinyin anwsers on my laptop compared to just tapping on android.
I see what you mean! This has been however been a source of confusion, and intuitively (without already being familiar with Skritter), I would believe one tends to expect a setting on the app to carry over if you change it in one place, especially if the app looks the same on the web and mobile versions, and even more so if some settings carry over, but not others. In your specific case, you could do a quick tap of the settings gear and change the filters briefly when you hop on the web/mobile apps. (It’s an extra step when you switch from mobile to web I realize, though). Additionally, if the settings were client dependent, every Skritterer would need to be made aware of this through the UI, which seems like it might be more confusing overall than having the settings unified in the unified clients.
