This 1 year upper bound on the interval makes me think I might have added too many words into my queue. I’ve studied almost 10.000 words, but that’s only about 2000 characters. So I still have much to learn. I would like the daily amount to be under 100, but that’s getting difficult.
Should I start deleting words and concentrate on single characters? I really wouldn’t like to do that, since words bring the single characters alive, its much easier to learn characters in their context.
Even if I concentrated on the new HSK words, that still would mean 11092 words. 11092/365=30.4, so that’s more than 30 words to be reviewed daily (if you get them right every time!). Are there any plans to change the upper bound on the intervel back to 3 or 5 years? One year made more sense when the HSK only had 5000 words.
I think it makes sense to ban words you don’t really need to review, as that will save you time in the long run. If you know ten thousand words, there’s bound to be a large set of words that you wouldn’t forget even if you didn’t touch Chinese fore ten years. You can safely ban these. It’s hard for me to say how many such words you have and which they are, but banning anything that has a very long interval and you don’t hesitate at all with is a good approach. I’ll have to check with the rest of the team for long-term plans!
My original plan was to use the old HSK decks. I did the HSK4 test a couple of months ago, but I didn’t pass it. Yes, I have almost 10.000 words on Skritter, but I still couldn’t pass the HSK4 exam which only has 1200 words… The reason for this is that I spend too much time on Skritter and not enough time on reading the textbooks. My listening skills are specially bad… I guess I got too excited when the new HSK decks came out, since they had thousands of words made up with the characters I already new. Maybe it’s time to really concentrate on passing HSK4 and 5, and not do so much skrittering…
That sounds like a reasonable plan! I think Skritter is great for vocabulary, but it isn’t designed to cover everything you need to learn Chinese. Extensive reading and listening are probably what you need, alongside Skritter. We obviously think that Skritter is worthwhile, but that doesn’t mean that we think that more Skritter is always better. You should definitely make sure you have enough time to listen and read as well!
Regarding large number of words, remember that you can just tap the right arrow to skip a word, which will mark it as correct. This means that when you encounter words you know well, they should only take a second or so to recognise, then hit the arrow. This means that having a large due count per day might not be as problematic as it first seems.
