Migrating to Skritter with Many Known Characters and Words

General
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Hello Skritter team. I just started a 7-day free trial. I’ve been learning Chinese for almost a year using a course and a flashcard program associated with that course. I’m dissatisfied with that flashcard program and want to migrate to Skritter. However, I’m running into some issues. These issues must be common for new users who aren’t coming in with zero Chinese knowledge, so a good solution could help Skritter gain and retain users.

First, I’ve found that there are premade decks on Skritter that contain the characters and words I already learned in my course. That’s great! I’ve added these decks to my account. I want to tell Skritter that I already know all the characters and words in these decks pretty well, so it can skip the learning mode and start me with a fairly large time gap between reviews. (While I can’t export card-by-card memory retention data from my old flashcard program, starting all the cards in the decks I already know with, say, a two-month gap before they next come up for review would be reasonable.) I don’t want to ban them all because there might be some in there that I could forget, so I’d prefer to have them in my queue but starting with a long time gap between reviews.

But I’ve not even seen an option to add all the characters and words in a deck to my list of learned characters and words. Both the Skritter website and Android app seem to require me to “learn” the cards one by one, clicking at least twice for every card, which would be unpleasant to do for thousands of cards that I already know.

I’ve seen and tested the “rejuvenate” option. This can be applied to a whole deck, but it’s not clear how it’s working. At first, it doesn’t seem to add any cards to my learned words list. It only seems to tell Skritter that I am familiar with the cards from that deck that are already in my learned words list. Then it fills in the circle next to these words to indicate stronger knowledge, but it doesn’t show what time gap it will give me before the next review of a word in a deck I’ve rejuvenated. And I thought Skritter prevents duplicate cards (unlike Anki) by having only one master entry per word no matter how many decks it appears in - so why does a character I already have marked as learned from some other deck not already show as having been learned in any new decks that contain the word? In other words, it seems like “rejuvenate” exists to solve a problem that shouldn’t be possible in the first place, since there shouldn’t be two different learning statuses attached to the same word where it appears in different decks.

When I checked back after typing up most of this post, I found that Skritter had marked about the first 56% of the characters and words in the deck with filled-in circles. That’s closer to what I wanted, but it happened only after a delay where I went to write this post, and it only added the first 56% of the characters and words from the deck, when I wanted it to add all of them.

The newly added words from rejuvenating do appear in my word list (good), but on the “stats” tab for one of those words, it just says “new” and I don’t see how to see the gap before the next review, so I don’t know what level of assumed familiarity with the characters and words is provided by rejuvenating.

Separately, I tried adding a deck not associated with the course I was taking. I learned some words from that deck inside Skritter. I was doing this to test Skritter as part of my 7-day trial, not intending to make those few words a part of my study routine yet. So I deleted the deck and selected the option confirming Skritter should remove this deck and all its words and my progress on those words from my account. This mostly seemed to work, but one of the learned words is still hanging around in my “My Words” list, even though it appears in zero decks associated with my account. (It is an uncommon, 4-character word. I’m certain it isn’t in any of the decks still associated with my account.) The main thing that makes this word different from the ones Skritter successfully removed from my word list is that I had previously tested banning and unbanning a word using this word, so maybe banning and unbanning it got it stuck to my account somehow. I don’t see any way to manually remove it from my “My Words” list.

Basically, to sum up, I feel like I’m hitting multiple bugs when trying to do simple things, and I don’t understand how Skritter expects the onboarding process to go for a learner who comes in with some pre-existing knowledge. How do I do things like mark a whole deck as learned and add all its words and characters to my word list? How do I set all of them so they have a long gap between reviews? Can I see what that gap is or customize it? Or if I’m not supposed to do that, what is Skritter’s philosophy for how to start using the tool when you come in knowing some Chinese?

And is there any way to remove that lingering word from my word list that isn’t associated with any deck linked to my account? I could do a total account data wipe now because I’m not invested in Skritter yet, but if a similar problem were to come up after I’ve been using Skritter for a while, wiping all data wouldn’t be a viable option for fixing issues like this.

I really want to switch to Skritter because I really dislike the flashcard program I was using, and I like many of Skritter’s features. But I’m struggling to understand how to get the system set up to better represent my pre-existing knowledge.

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I see no replies yet to my previous post. I’ll note a few more things I’ve noticed:

There are differences between my saved data as it appears in the Skritter Android app and the Skritter website. For example, the 4-character word that I mentioned is stuck in my list of known words (even after deleting the only list containing that word from my account) only appears in the Android app. It’s not in my known word list when I view that same list on the Skritter website.

On the other hand, on the Skritter website, some words appear twice in my known word list. For instance, I have two copies of 一 (yi1) in my known word list on the Skritter website but only one copy in my known words list on the Skritter app. And the Skritter app contains a bunch of additional known words that I manually clicked to say I am learning, but they don’t appear in my known word list on the website. I’ve selected the “Sync” option from the app’s menu, and it doesn’t produce any error messages, but the word lists remain different between the website and the app even after running the “Sync” command.

Given all these bugs, maybe my account has gotten into in a corrupted state. If so, I’d better not keep adding words to it and using it. I’m not sure what I can do to get my account back into a “working normally” state other than a total data wipe, so I’m going to try that now. Hopefully the datw wipe will remove all my lists and known words from both the app and the website. If the data wipe fails to clean everything out, I can try deleting the account entirely and re-creating it, if Skritter allows me to re-use the same email address for a re-created account.

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Welcome, JeffR!

And sorry you’re running into issues getting your account to a point where you can really take advantage of what Skritter can offer. Emailing team@skritter.com is the best way to get in touch with us about specific account issues so we can keep a conversation going and open tickets if needed.

But, I’ll try my best to see if I can help with some of the things you posted here… or at least share how Skritter currently works.

Pre-made decks help you jump in anywhere and just start studying–but we don’t have a way to space things out if you already know them right off the bat. Right now, the only way to get stuff into your review queue is to learn it inside of individual decks–marking as learned will speed up this process, but there isn’t a way to bulk add everything to a review queue at this time.

Skritter assumes no word familiarity–even if you rejuvenate things. Rejuvenation just marks items you’ve studied in other decks as learned, which means they get skipped when you go into a learning activity inside a deck.

Skritter will sort out your familiarity with characters and words as you review them in the app. For best results, turn on the 4-button SRS option on the mobile client and mark things as “Easy.”

Scoring things as “Easy” is the most aggressive option for spacing things out into the future.

Sorry again that you’re running into issues. Skritter doesn’t currently have a great way to get everything you already know into our system–and even if we could do that, there is always the question of how much time should you spend reviewing things you already know vs. learning new stuff?

If you’re looking to see how good Skritter is as helping you learn and remember things, I would ignore previous chapters of your textbook and start learning from things you’re studying right now. And then maybe sprinkle some previously known words into the mix over time. Skritter isn’t going to be a super fun tool to use if you have thousands of study cards due every day, but when you’re learning stuff every day and remembering it for class and beyond, it really is magical.

Again, shoot us an email at team@skritter.com with some of the issues you’re seeing and we’ll take a look!

-Jake

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Thanks, Jake. I appreciate it. I’ll email you at that email address if I have any issues I want to troubleshoot with you.

I did the whole account data reset. This removed all my lists and words correctly (though it failed to remove a mnemonic I saved, but no big deal). This affected both app and website.

I then went through and manually added the 1,400 words / characters / radicals I already know, and I marked them all as “learned.” As you suggest, I don’t want to be tested on reviewing all of them (there are thousands of reviews because each word has multiple flashcards). But I don’t really want to leave them set to not having been learned at all because then they are indistinguishable from words I haven’t started learning. I need some system of record to track all the words I’ve learned, and maybe Skritter can be that master record. I think I’d rather set them to “banned” status to keep them out of my reviews. That way, words I know well will be banned (but in my word list), words I’m working on memorizing will be in my review queue, and words I don’t know at all will not be on my word list. Hopefully that works with Skritter’s paradigm.

I’m now painstakingly going through and copying my mnemonics in manually from the other flashcard program to Skritter.

If you know 1,400 words when starting with Skritter, there’s quite a bit of setup time to replicate the known words from another flashcard program since it has to be done by hand, and the best you can do for words you know well is either to omit them, to ban them, or to choose “easy” when reviewing them to try to quickly get their review interval up. I’ll get it done, because I’ve tested a lot of SRS flashcard programs, and I think Skritter has the best overall feature set for learning Chinese. So it’ll be worth the manual effort. And I don’t need to copy mnemonics for words I know well, so that will save time.

Ideas for features to make Skritter even better in the future:

  1. A “Mark all as learned” option in a deck’s menu, similar to rejuvenate, but sets all items’ status to “learned,” not just items already marked as learned in another deck
  2. Make rejuvenation automatic (and remove menu option to trigger it). If you learned a word in one deck, you know that word, so it should have the same status in other decks without the user needing to click a menu option. Words in all decks can reference a user-specific table of known words to look up their learning or banned status, and only that main table needs to be kept up-to-date, to prevent the need to sync data across variables or decks.
  3. Ensure alignment between the user’s data state in the app and in the website. Which decks are attached to your account, which words in the decks are learned, your mnemonics, and the your main “my words” list that is drawn from all decks should be identical whether viewed in the app or in the website. Maybe the app and website should draw from the same database entries so misalignment would be impossible. (But don’t lose the offline card review capabilities of the app - one of the great things about Skritter is the ability to do flashcards without an Internet connection. So temporary misalignment while offline might be necessary.)
  4. Though Skritter is generally much better than my old flashcard program, one useful feature my old flashcard program had that Skritter doesn’t have is the ability to add images to the backs of cards (shown whenever the mnemonic is shown). I used text-based mnemonics in most cases but found images to be very powerful when the meaning of the word differed greatly from the meaning of its component characters, and I could relate the sound of the word to its meaning with a vivid image.
  5. For folks who want to learn to type the characters via pinyin keyboard input but not to handwrite them, it would be great to include a text entry field on the “writing” cards, perhaps just below the handwriting field, so people can choose which method they wish to use to produce the character. I’ve been learning handwriting and actually can handwrite my 1,400 words from memory, but I’m starting to think it will not be worth it for me to learn to handwrite every single character and word I want to be able to recognize and type. Adding a text entry field to “writing”-type cards would be an easy, low-software-development-effort way to support folks who want to use pinyin keyboards to “write" their characters. (You could optionally rename the card type from “writing” to “writing/typing” to highlight the new flexibility.)
  6. When exporting your list of known words from the website, include a column for “mnemonic” and include the text mnemonic associated with each word in that column of the exported file. Currently, it produces columns only for the character, pinyin, and definition in the output file. This is probably another easy one.

I think those items are the main pain points. Skritter is already pretty darn great, and I haven’t seen anything better as a flashcard system for learning Chinese. If some of the items above could be addressed, it would make Skritter all but perfect. I hope this is helpful!

Jeff

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You’re my kinda crazy for manually getting things organized the way you like–I think you’ll fit in well here in the Skritter community!

I’ve been tinkering with definitions, mnemonics, and decks for over a decade, and it is a never-ending process. But there are certainly things we can do to make it easier!

Thanks for the suggestions and for taking the time to write this all up. Got my mind racing with some ideas on how we can improve things in the future.

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