Hey guys, I’m looking for some help here. I’ve been a dedicated Skritter user for over five months now, and just recently hit 1500 characters. I plan on continuing using Skritter for quite a bit more as I eventually hope to talk the TOCFL test. I’m living in Taiwan, and studying 22 hours a week in a language center.
My question is, how can I go about this in a better way? I’m already spending over an hour a day, recently it’s been close to two hours, and I’m almost never able to catch up on reviews. I’ve already put my retention rate (begrudgingly) down to 85%, and I’ve started adding words every 25 reviews so I get SOME new content, but it still feels like I’m just always drowning.
Any other long time users have any tips or tricks? Any other setting I can mess with?
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I’m in almost the same place. Are you adding words or characters? I started adding words because it improved my character retention, but it’s definitely making Skritter less efficient as I write probably 100+ characters a day that I absolutely don’t need to practice (面, 到, etc).
I’ve commented on Skritter’s inefficiency before, but I bet if I measured now I spend more than half of my Skritter time is just “overhead”. Waiting for page loads. Waiting for review loads. Writing characters I don’t need practice on. Getting things wrong repeatedly because Skritter doesn’t schedule new material effectively to help me learn it.
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I forgot to mention that since the new Beta update, I’ve been using the old Skritter 2.35 and find it INFINITELY less buggy and frustrating. Every now and then it freezes, crashes, or gets stuck in a loop of like 20 reviews but all the is easily fixed by closing and reopening the program.
I am frustrated by the fact that “Too Easy” function doesn’t actually seem to have an effect on how often reviews come up. There’s some new words in encountering on lists that I actually already know (for example 北邊) but it seems I have to go through the paces of learning it like the whole thing is brand new. I’m hoping that when the new beta is finally up to scratch, the SRS will be better configured and maybe even have some solutions for us serious users.
I’m not exactly sure what you mean, adding characters or adding words. I just click the little plus symbol up in the top and add a new word (I’m pretty sure it’s word?). Is there a setting to change this?
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I’ve found that “too easy” has to be selected for everything to work. So if you write 北 and then 边 and then click “too easy” I think it ends up taking the “worst” result for the word, which was the 北 you left at the default level. I got this idea from reading their API docs, but it seems to be true.
By words vs characters I think you answered by mentioning 北边. I think Skritter is really optimized to just learn characters by themselves (i.e. you learn a list with 北 and 边 individually and don’t study 北边 on Skritter itself). For one thing, there are bugs with studying words (e.g. if you have the default learning mode set for new words, it will count as getting the writing wrong for anything you already knew, messing up the SRS). For another thing, it doesn’t have any special cases to save time, like the dozen words ending in 然 all make you write 然 again.
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