This is something I’ve been trying to pay more attention to recently and the behavior has been pretty consistent for a while now so I feel OK about bringing it up to see if there is any way to fix it. The problem is that my due count when reviewing is not going down by 1 a lot of the time, so if I’ve got 88 due and I finish a word, the number will drop down to 86, sometimes it’ll drop down by 3 as well, seemingly at random. The problem seems to get worse in the evening, where I’ve come to do my reviews and the number will say like 96, then I do a review and it rapidly drops down to 26 or something. I also check how many I’ve done at the end of the day and though I’ve done all that were due that day, the number is lower than what my daily stats on the site said I’d have to do.
I’m not sure what’s causing this. I thought it might be that I was being shown the due count for my characters instead of words, but the numbers don’t add up. A lot of my reviews of late have been of 4 character idioms as opposed to the typical 2 character compounds, not sure if that would be causing any issues or what.
Not very helpful, but I ignore the fine details of the review count (and progress statistics) as I don’t know how they’re calculated and as you say they seem to bounce up and down unpredictably sometimes.
I’ve been the same for the most part until recently when I started looking at the number and noticed it happening a lot, which is why I brought it up. I thought it might have just been me with the problem but seems like it’s not. If it’s always been like this then I guess that’s somewhat reassuring, though it would be nice if the number was always accurate.
It’s not just you. I’ve gotten used to the quirky behavior of the review counter, so I’m not too concerned, but yes, the initial number can sometimes be way larger than the number of items you will actually get to review. Jumps by 2, 3 or 4 is normal. I figure it’s probably just that the app doesn’t parse the entire review list to figure our the exact count, but simply shows some sort of maximum number, and then drops off items that weren’t really due for review. Perhaps it’s also because of weird characters in your lists of which some don’t have a definition in their database, so when it’s time for review it’s simply skipped. Just speculating at this point, but I figure this may be the reason because the longer I study, and the more obscure characters I add, the worse this behavior has gotten. At this point it happens I start Skritter, and a minute or two into studying, the review list jumps to like 13,000 items, only to after a few items studied start to spin like crazy down again until it settles at like 4,000, and then after handful more start spinning down to 3,000, and so on. Eventually it settles somewhere near the real review count that might be a few hundred. But I’m quite used to the behavior, so it’s not bothering me too much to be honest. Nothing that prevents me from studying anyway. Regularly killing Skritter (at least weekly) and restarting also helps the review counter better reflect reality.
"When you study an item, it often pushes back related items at the same time so that, for example, if you study the reading for a word, you don’t necessarily see the tone or definition or writing for that same word too soon.
We had plans to tweak how the item count is done on the iOS app to see if we can make it always go down by one, but it’s a complicated and bug-prone system"
That would explain the issue for some but what about those of us who us Skritter for writing almost exclusively? I have a few recognition words in there, definitely not enough to account for the discrepancy that occurs with the due counter though. Most days they don’t even come up because they are spaced so far apart. Might it be something else that is causing it for me? The most confusing thing is sometimes I’m at 0 and the number will suddenly shoot up to like 90 and then after a few reviews drop back to 0 again. That’s not much of a problem, the main problem for me is I’d like to know ahead of time exactly how many reviews will be due, just to have an idea of how much time I’ll need to spend that day going through them. I’m never sure if the calculated items due in the next 5 days is accurate at all.