Hi everyone
I’m returning to Skritter after a long break from both Skrittering and actively studying Mandarin. What are your tips and advice on catching up with my 5000 reviews (which are nearly a year old), versus nuking and starting again, or another approach?
Hand in hand with this is the question of the most efficient way to get back into studying in general - revising old books and courses? Starting afresh?
Any and all advice welcome!
(I’m aware that this has been asked before but not recently so I thought I’d make a new post.)
Hi Catherine,
I thik you can start with your rewies. Eventualy you can ban the most of them and after to unban a certain amount per day. Even after one year they are not necesary totaly forgotten.
I sugest to review the grammar from your text books. You can use Mandarin Compagnion to. The books for the beginers have a Wikigrammar for each chapter. They have just realised a new book, The prince and the pauper.
I’m in a similar boat–I’ve been too busy working on Skritter lately and my review queue has gotten to about 1,500! For me, working in small chunks and not overdoing it is key. So don’t try and tackle 1,000 items in a day or study for 3 hours (unless that’s what you normally do). Keep it manageable and sane, and just be as consistent as you can. Eventually you’ll knock it down. That’ll also space the future SRS reviews out in a more manageable manner.
Alternatively, if you find you don’t remember a lot of the material and the reviews are overwhelming, the “scorched earth” policy can be useful to get rid of your reviews. Reset all your account data, and start fresh. I did this once and am happy I did so.
Speaking as someone who fell off the bandwagon for a couple years after college, start with whatever you’re most motivated to do. If want to open up an old textbook, then do that. Or jump fresh into a new reader/book, podcast, TV show, etc. Re-build up your interest and motivation. I think talking with a person is the best motivator, and there are lots of teachers/tutors/language exchange partners you can find in-person or online. Don’t dwell on re-learning every little bit perfectly, and keep moving forward! You can always look up a grammar point or character when you need to.
I’m using the old android app, my method may not work on other versions, but what I tend to do when I end up in this situation is that I use the filter function to study just one list and I study that list until zero. Then I add a second list and study it to zero. Repeat. I do this so that I only get small chunks of reviews at a time, allowing me to see the numbers go down (going from 100 to 0 is a lot more encouraging than going from 2000 to 1900) and since I keep all of my caught up lists in my filter it keeps bringing in the items I need to review. This is important since when I’ve been away a while I miss a lot of reviews since they are so far past the SRS calculated due date. Often they need to be put in the queue for a short period so that I can get them back into my memory, but if I’m studying everything at once, something that needs to be studied again in an hour may be shoved back into a huge list and I won’t get to it for two weeks. I feel when I do this that I end up with a huge number of items that I don’t remember well but that are being spaced out too far for me to get caught up on them.
