Hi all,
I have a huge amount of reviews to get through after letting them build up - I am going to try spend about 20 mins a day doing it as that is all I can manage at the moment. How long do I need to spend per day to chip away at the queue or maybe I should just start over? Arrrh
小麦
Depends how many you have queued up and what proportion of the 4,700+ you get right first time.
In 20 minutes a day I could probably clear out 100 or so reviews. So that would take a month and a half to clear through 4,700 if you get every one right and don’t have any coming up for a second review. More realistically, you’ll probably add at least 10% that you get wrong and have to practise again, and many being queued up for second and further reviews.
There’s a lot of variables but I’d expect it to take at least five reviews for each before you finish doing that first month and a half unless they already have long review times. So you’re probably looking at 9 months to a year total to clear out to decent length review times at 20 minutes a day.
I’ve cleared out about that number of reviews in a weekend by just Skrittering all weekend. You end up with a lot of re-reviews to come the next week, but it is doable. Maybe up your review time per day?
Not much benefit to starting over in my opinion - I’ve been in a similar situation where I’ve just chipped away, and would set goals like keeping up with new reviews (i.e. not going backwards and reviews day to day), and when I managed that trying to reduce by 50 or a 100 per day. The more you see the number going down the more incentivised you are to keep studying. You’ll get there eventually. The spacing algorithm will make sure you don’t really get overwhelmed because ones you get wrong will be repeated on very short intervals.
It also depends on what characters and words you have added. Have you added things you really think you ought to know? Then don’t start over or delete things. Have you added lots of stuff without thinking too much? Then ban everything you think is unnecessary and review the rest. If you’re afraid of losing important words, you can always ask someone to go through your banned words, find the useful ones and unban them. In general, banning a lot and then gradually unbanning later will make what @ximeng suggests easier!
Thanks both for the advice, that’s great. Seems like soldiering on is the best option. I have limited time and can get bored unless I combine doing it with music but I do find Skritter an essential tool for preserving what I know or have learned previously.
Could be a few words that I could ban; if I ban a word, but then later try to add it again, will I get an option to reactivate it or something?
Hopefully in 9 months or less I will reach zero 
champagne on hold!
Cheers
It will notify you that the word has previously already been added, but not explicitly tell you that it has been banned. However, if you choose to force add the word, it’s relatively easy to see that it has been banned under “my words”. It’s also easy to unban words in the web version.
If you’re afraid of running out of steam, I strongly suggest time boxing. Set a timer for ten minutes and do you best within that time range. Do that a few times per day and you’ll catch up. Do not just study until you get bored or tired, this just creates a lot of negative feelings towards reviewing. Do your ten minutes and maintain a positive attitude. Spread it out.
You could try a divide-and-conquer approach. Use Advanced Study to only study one list. Once you’ve cleared out all of the reviews from that list, add a second list to the mix. Keep going this way until you’ve reconquered all of your lists. I am not sure, but maybe you could achieve the same effect by removing all lists and slowly adding them back again.
The advantage of this method is that you can feel serious progress, and you don’t forget things because the scheduling algorithm can’t show it to you because of the mountain of other reviews.
Personally I would start with the oldest/easiest lists because they are less likely to have reviews pending, and because you’re less likely to get them wrong. Your newest words from your newest lists are probably totally forgotten and you should save them for later. Otherwise you’ll forget things while wasting your time on the newest words that you don’t really know anyways.
Well, I recently had a lot of reviews, too, and just couldn’t bring them down again so I did the whole ‘reset everything! kill the data, kill it now!’-thing.
And for me personally I think that was the right decision.
Artificially as it may be, reaching “0 due” is a great deal of motivation for me and looking at the progress bar and seeing the graph trending upwards also helps a lot (even if the numbers are smaller). Triggers my dopamine system in all the right ways.
Yes, I have to go through a lot of characters and words I already know very well but breezing through them can be satisfying as well. And not having a huge pile waiting there for me definitely changed my attitude towards Skrittering back to positive. But again, that’s just me. Different strokes and all, no pun intended.
I just started about a month ago after about roughly 10 months of abstinence and had 6000 reviews.
I was overwhelmed at first, but I managed to get rid of them in about a week or so.
I don’t know how it is actually calculated but did not have to have 6000 reviews as the pile decreased much quicker than I did reviews. (eg. I did about 100 reviews at first and it said I had only 5500 more to go).
Just try out those 4700+ reviews might be actually a lot less than you think.
I’ve discovered that my limited time to study is being sucked into writing and not getting very far so as some have suggested I am currently excluding writing to get the bulk of reviews down and then hope to reactivate this later. This is also more productive to my overall aims to be a translator someday as writing is just a ‘nice to have’ thing really. I will update how I get on and if this works. Thanks