Skritter stats

Chinese
1

I don’t quite understand the Skritter “Stats” / “Metrics”, especially between web & mobile, so I thought I would post something a bit generic.

For my account, I see:

  • Skritter - Learn to Write Chinese and Japanese Characters says 300 items learned = 176 characters + 124 words and “13:54:31
    hours studied”
  • Skritter Android or iPhone “Progress” “Overall” says 300 “Total words” = Unique characters 239 and “Total study time” 22h2m41s

Comments:

  1. I would try to be consistent on the naming between: “item”, “character”, “unique character”, “word”. It’s really not obvious in the current naming. Is a “character” also a “word”? Does it have to be 2+ “characters”? Is “item” = “character” + “word”? etc…
  2. Hours studied is important to see how much energy is being put in learning. There seem to be different way on how it’s measured? 13:54:31 vs 22:02:41 seems like a big discrepancy.
  3. Ideally the mobile app and website use the exact same UI / naming / Metrics, so at least that’s consistent across devices.
  4. Overall I would say that these “stats” might come across as a less important feature than the actual learning, but my take is that these are critical to “beginners” (example: me) as it is an important way to motivate and set goals. Example, for me, a milestone is going to be HSK 3.0 HSK1 (500), which will open HSK 3.0 HSK2, etc…

Just a few thoughts on “Stats” / “Metrics”, keep up the good work.

1 Like
2

Thanks for the feedback and comments. The naming scheme for “items” (words, characters, sentences) on the website has always been confusing, which is why we’re trying to simplify things on the mobile app. We’ve hired a new designer and we’ll be working on updating all of this stuff in the future to make sure Skritter is consistent across platforms.

The Skritter apps on mobile are doing a lot more tracking for learning, testing, and reviewing, which is why the time is higher on mobile. The mobile app also does calculations on any unique characters you’ve learned in the app, which is why that metric is displayed separately any may appear higher.

On the website, the difference between a word and a character is a lot more ambiguous. It’s just the way the old API was written. All of the mobile app changes and improvements will be deployed to the website in the future.

For now, based on your usage, I would consider the mobile app the best source of truth for the way you’re studying.

If I could Thanos snap and make everything the same in one go, I’d do it. Unfortunately, it’ll take a little more time and effort on our end to align things across platforms.

Thanks for your patience along the way!

1 Like
3

A plea to bring legacy website progress graphs to the new Skritter!

The “mountain” of learning progress by day/week/month/year is soooo much more helpful and motivating.

Progress expressed in numerals is just not as visually motivating as a graph.

4

What does the overall progress graph in the app actually show? Since the number of total words is in bigger font over it, one would assume the graph shows the progress of total words. However, it seems to me that the progress graph shows the progress of unique characters, not the progress of total words. Lately I’ve been learning only new words (with no new characters in them), but the graph hasn’t gone up.

5

@MikaS I don’t follow progress in the mobile app as I find the final numbers approach not very helpful.

I do follow it on the legacy website, where actual progress is shown by means of a graph, allowing you to compare month by month, week by week, and day by day.

The graphs also show the difference between characters and words, and even breaks these down into definitions, pinyin, writing and tone.

They’re so much more encouraging (building that mountain daily) and enlightening. Hope to see them available on the app soon.

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6

Process graph currently shows words that have been learned from reviews (from the v1 API). It should be going up after you successfully review new words in the daily queue. I did some quick testing comparing legacy and mobile and learning one new item immediately showed an increase in the number and the chart.

Servers were super slow this weekend, which might have been causing some issues. If you’re still not seeing numbers go up email team@skritter.com so we can get a dialogue going and look into your account further.

8

On my phone the last couple of months of the graph looked like a horizontal line, but when I took a screenshot and looked at it closer, I saw that the line is in fact getting a bit higher. Sorry about the unnecessary question!

1 Like
9

Glad things are working as intended! We’ll be adding some additional graph views in the future that’ll make scaling in and out of overall progress a lot easier to see with some short-term and long-term views. And no worries! My graph is doing about the same thing in the total words learned department :sweat_smile: