Hi,
I took a break recently from Skritter and wanted to continue using it now. In the meanwhile, my review queue has grown to 3000+ cards, and this is kind of a problem. I don’t know how to use Skritter as before, creating new lists and adding from those lists, because it forces me to review 3000 cards first. I don’t want to delete the old lists, i just don’t want to review them for the time being, and rather make new lists and study only those. Is there a way to do so?
So I still haven’t figured out a way, but maybe a suggestion for what I am missing: A list can be set to either of two review modes: “Add” and “Review”. Right now, I would like to have a third option like “Inactive”, so that words for review are not drawn from those lists. This would have the advantage that I do not have to delete those lists and that I can just start to study new lists immediately.
Personally when the list is too large I just press enter all the time, it’s quite boring to do but in 1 or 2h should be clear
So how I worked around this issue now: I exported most of my old lists, so I don’t lose them completely, until I had just some hundred cards left due and then reviewed those.
I think @SkritterJake might have a more ambitious reply in the making, but in the meantime, I’ll share what I do. I also see that you found a solution that works for you, but I thought I’d share my experience in case other users read this. My situation is not identical to yours, but it’s close enough that it might help!
When I started using Skritter again for my own learning (rather than for testing purposes), I had accumulated a due queue of somewhere around 5000 characters. I only study writing and only single characters, so that’s a serious pile, drawn from roughly ten different decks.
What I do to avoid the problems you mention is to go to normal review, then select only certain decks to review from. Ignore the large due counter on the dashboard for now. When you start, you select only one deck. You work your way through that deck until you’ve depleted the due cards in it. Then keep going with the other decks. Since you’re only working actively on catching up on one deck at a time, things you get wrong will show up immediately in the next session. You can also study and learn new things from other lists by studying them and then including them by including those lists when selecting which lists to review.
I’ve been doing this for a month or two now and I’m down to about 2000 due, most of them in two specific decks that contain a lot of fairly rare characters. When I review, I select everything but those two, which makes Skritter work like you want. There is no way to inactivate decks, but by always doing selecting reviewing, you achieve the same result (it would be great if this was easier to do, but it does at least work)!
Personally when the list is too large I just press enter all the time, it’s quite boring to do but in 1 or 2h should be clear
I strongly advice against doing this, unless you have spent significant time writing characters outside Skritter. You’re effectively telling the algorithm that “hey, even though I haven’t studied this for a year, I still know it well”, which will push it out even farther into the future. If your only goal is to remove the queue, this obviously does the trick, but I assume that the goal is to still maintain the knowledge that these characters and words represent, so simply marking them all as correct is not a very good idea.
Don’t do this! (I’m not sure if you’re just joking though)! It would be better to just reset your account if you’d like an easy way to clear your queue. The idea is to schedule items based on your memory of them. If you mark things correct that you don’t remember, they are going to be spaced out with the assumption you remembered it.
The best way to handle a large queue (in my opinion) is to make sure you aren’t adding new words until the queue is low / manageable, and to set a specific amount of time each day that you can commit to without going under or over. Ideally the maximum amount of time you’ll know you will be able to commit to. As long as you spend the same amount of time each day without missing a day, and you’re not adding new items, the queue will start dwindling down though it will take some time.
If you’ve been away for awhile and feel like you might have forgotten a lot of things, really resetting your account isn’t that big of a deal. It won’t delete your custom lists, definitions, or mnemonics, and you can always mark something as “too easy” if you know it well (or even ban it if you know it so well you don’t need to be bothered with it)! That might be a good solution for somehow who gets overwhelmed by seeing a large review number, and it feels really good to be able to get the queue down to 0 daily.