Skritter: Write Chinese Beta Released!

[SkritterJake (Jake (高健）)]

Hi everyone. Hope you’re having a great weekend! We’ll be tackling bugs again and getting back to work on Monday, but I wanted to take a bit of time to keep the conversation going and address a few things before then. Thanks for all the wonderful comments and feedback so far!

@Apomixis

It’s a fantastic resource if you like understanding the history, structure, and “developmental” etymology of the characters as they stand today.

That is exactly what I would expect out of Outlier. Thanks for the great write-up! I’ve got the course but we’ve been a bit busy with other things at the moment so I haven’t had a chance to check it out beyond the first lesson.

Glad to hear you’re enjoying it. I speak for the entire Skritter team when I say that we’re happy to have their course content on Skritter and support what John and Ash are working on over at Outlier. A lot!

@Apomixis

Is there any feedback on the thinking/plan surrounding the yellow grade in Skritter? Is it gone for good?

Many of the decisions we’ve made for these apps are based on the objective of keeping how things work on the new Skritter mobile apps as simple and easy to understand as possible from a new user perspective and balancing that with expectations of you and existing Skritter users who are used to the days where Skritter was only an SRS system. I’m not qualified to speak to about the back-end of the scheduling system, but on a basic level the new Review mode is supposed to work with these principles in mind

1. You know something or you don’t
   By removing so-so and too easy, we’re removing the temptation to make excuses or exceptions about what you know about a given card.

2. Review incorrect cards quickly
   The better the system knows what you’re getting correct and incorrect, the faster we can show you the things you’re struggling with. Incorrect cards will always be due for review the following day.

Although not featured yet in the application, we’re working on adding an additional element to the Review Report screen that will allow you to do a short and focused study session (probably in the form of a jumbled test) on all cards you marked as “Forgot” until the end of the day. This gives you more opportunities to review what you got wrong, and also boost the % chance that you’ll get it correct during the next day’s review session.

One thing to keep in mind is that Review mode shouldn’t be viewed in a vacuum in this app. The website and previous versions of Skritter were only built with one study button, and thus one study mode. Now, Skritter has three study modes, and each is designed to tackle different parts of the learning process.

I’m not saying the 4-button grading system is gone forever, but we’re going to give this a try for now. It is a beta after all

We do think that it will be easier to explain and conceptualize for new people using Skritter for the first time, and we think that in the long-term the simplification will actually improve the ways we can help everyone make things stick better in long-term memory!

@Farham

Somehow I got the feeling that the review mode is not working properly. It constantly asks me the same vocabulary even though I completed them just at the same day for several times. Further, when I finish the review mode by going back to the menu, the due count suddenly increase to a way higher number compared to what I just finished in review mode.

So right now it doesn’t make sense to keep studying the review mode, I will wait for a fix

I’ve got an issue open that is probably very similar to the things you’re currently seeing. I’m copy & pasting my bug report notes in here. See my bold comments below for a potential workaround at the moment. Also, you could log out of your account and log back again and the queue number should update. Less than ideal if your account takes a while to load, but it’ll help you clear so more reivews while we investigate.

Bug Notes:
Title: Ghosts of review cards past appear on the home screen after loading decks or doing another activity
Device: iPhone X
Account: gaojian

Steps:

1. Study all due Review cards down to zero
2. Return to Home and confirm that the reviews due button is gone
3. Open a deck from the home screen and let it fully load all info
4. Return to the Home screen
5. Extra step: press the review button again and the cards that appear due should be ones already studied (and probably also some of the new cards due for the day)

Actual Results:
The cards due for review button appears on the home screen with a bunch of cards due that the user just studied.

Expected Results:
Review button is gone until tomorrow

Notes:
Video one is the behavior happening during testing. I didn’t even need to do another activity. Just going into a deck and fetching info from the server was enough to bump the cards due up again. Video two is a test for closing and opening the app. Closing and opening the app appears to have helped reduce the queue number to one, but I’ve also seen two cards and three cards due as well. The due card is always something previously studied, and also likely to be something that was just learned and added to the queue the previous day.

@Apomixis

I don’t know if that means the algorithms have adapted and started to bring in more vocabulary, or if the Skritter team did some back-end-database-manipulation to change things, since I mentioned it above.

But I am seeing that the vocabulary is behaving more like I expected over a longer period of time.

It would be good if the Skritter team would comment on if there are some learning/adaptation needed by the SRS algorithm when it starts afresh, or if there is actually something amiss in the system.

Glad to hear that you’re seeing more vocabulary from longer periods of time. I saw the same thing once I start actively clearing my queue on 3.1.4. We’re not seeing tons of issues with the Review queue, but there are certain things that we still need to investigate. See above for one example of the things that is amiss in the system

@Benjamin

My reviews aren’t syncing or tracking in the stats page. It stopped working yesterday and, after doing some reviews this morning, the stats still say 0. It also hasn’t synced the reviews to the website.

Dang… Is this still the case today on the app or when you check stats on skritter.com and legacy.skritter.com? If so, can you send an email to team@skritter.com with additional details so we can investigate further? We haven’t gotten any other similar reports, so I’m not sure what the issue might be, but we’ll certainly take a look!

Thanks again for all the feedback everyone. Taiwan team will be online later today and we’ll keep fixing stuff and rolling out updates. Stay tuned and happy studying!