That sounds like a great way to think about it. If you’ve already learned the word elsewhere, or know how to write all the characters in a word already you certainly don’t need to spend the time going through all the learning mode steps.
Marking a word as learned will have no impact on the review queue (due values or retention rate), only that it will added to the queue and will be ready to study in review mode.
Hope that helps!
You’re 100% correct. The current website is following the original model of Skritter for the time being. Eventually, we’re planning on updating the website to match the Learn/Test/Review model, along with some other fun features we’ve got planned for the future.
The tentative plan of attack is start working on an early alpha version of the new framework for the website in a few months, and work with a small group of people for feedback and testing. This change will not be happening suddenly overnight, and we’ll be sure to provide a lot more details as we get closer to an open beta, or any kind of full update.
You’re very welcome!
Sure!
By default, review mode is a combination of new cards added to the queue after being studied in learning mode, and all items that have is due for review on any given day based on the scheduling system. It is calculated once at the start of the day and fetches all characters/words that would be due during the day. Each card that is due will show up once for the day, and once it graded will be scheduled into the future. Similar to “Advanced Study” on iOS, you can also choose to filter some things if you don’t want to see everything due at once. Options include:
The objective is to get the queue to zero, which means you have successfully reviewed everything due for the day and you’re ready to learn new stuff, take some tests, or close the app and use the language in the wild, or do other stuff 
If you mark something incorrect (“forgot”), it will still be due again after you finish your current review session. We’re planning on providing a more detailed report of incorrect cards in the future, but for now, they’re just available for study again. They’ll keep showing up as due until you’ve given them another score (hard, got it, easy), at which point they’ll no longer be due until the next day.
Note: We’ve taken note of some of the discussions about where a “new” item should show up in the review queue, and it appears to be pretty user-dependent. Expect some degree of control over this in future versions of the app as a study setting.
The “Advanced” options on the Review Settings screen give more control over how many cards you’ll be able to see/study during a given day.
By turning off “Due Only,” you can enter a review session that contains every card on your account. An all card session is excellent for smaller accounts that are looking for a more comprehensive review of everything on the account, but probably not a very practical mode for most of us with tons of items.
By turning on “Continuous,” you can start a review session that won’t stop until you exit the session. You’ll still see any new cards that you’ve added for the day, but the study algorithm will recalculate a lot more often based on the grades you’re giving cards during the session. Cards marked “forgot,” and “hard,” for example, will show up again during the study session similar to what you might expect on the website or the other mobile apps. Also, like the website and other mobile apps, it can take a lot longer to get through cards that are due for the day since the due/readiness value of items is continually changing based on all the items you’re reviewing.
Note: We consider this “Advanced” because it is possible to overstudy cards and push them far into the future by continually marking them correct. Similar to how Skritter works on all other clients at the moment, but something we’d like to make more clear on this version of the app.
I hope that helps clear things up. Be sure to try out the continuous session and let us know how it goes!
Lots more to do, but it certainly feels (internally anyway) like we’re making some substantial progress to our goals. More updates to follow!
-Jake
Hi Jake. Thanks for the detailed response. It is very unfortunate that auto add will not be back as the new solution does not seem to be as good for me. As a user, I am not able to evaluate when and how many new words I should add to the queue. Based on my experience with other platforms that take this approach, I always add too much when I am low on reviews and that makes the SRS balloon in no time, making the whole process useless. What made skritter different and better was that the algorithm would give you new words when you were ready to see new words.
To your point of needing to have a different experience for new words, it could have just been a screen saying “I added a new word, do you want me to teach it to you?” whenever the algo added a word. It could have been seamless, didn’t have to be unnaturally split in two separate modes.
I’m sorry if this sounds critical, I want to stress that I’m very grateful for the experience so far. I have been using skritter for almost 5 years and learned a whole bunch of Chinese thanks to it. Unfortunately new skritter doesn’t do it for me so that will be the end once my annual subscription expires in a few months. Nonetheless I wish you guys all the best and hopefully your changes will be good for the other users!
Hi Jake, Thanks for your explanation.
But I hope the future Skritter will also useful for people how just want to learn how to write and don’t want to learn “Skritter”. All these new options are very nice but first you should provide me a manual and then it cost me a lot of time to study all these new settings.
As I post at the forum before; what I like is one extra button “learn to write” and you should do your magic in the background without me having to think about it.
You’re absolutely correct. We have release notes, and we do have a guide, but we can certainly do a better job of making changes and updates known in the app. Feel free to email team@skritter.com with any questions you might have, and we’ll be happy to help. It’ll also help u figure out better ways to introduce changes and updates into the app!
On this note I wonder if you could bring back the due count to display during review. When I choose an individual list to review, I do not know how many items are due from that list, it kinda feels endless without a “progress bar” of sorts.
And regarding learn mode as discussed, have you considered adding other ways of making the word stick apart from just showing pinyin, tone, stroke order? Any plans to integrate simple sample sentences or such to make the word stick in context?
Thanks in advance.
Due count should be displayed when you’re reviewing. Even if you select a single deck to study from it will show the total cards due for the deck.
Do you happen to mean when “Continuous,” mode is selected? There is not a due count on that mode because at that point you’re just studying through items in the deck, not just cards due the app will always try and prioritize items that are due over items that are not due, but there is no stopping point to base a “due” number on.
Jake, I appreciate the thoughtfulness the Skritter team is putting into the app design. I understand that there is an opportunity to make onboarding of users into these languages more seamless by separating learning from reviewing.
Nevertheless, I love the auto-add feature of the old app and the web app. Is there any hope at all that you guys would make this at least an option for the new app? Maybe not the default, because I understand you want to simplify things for new users. But an option for people who are already a bit deeper?
Another long-time user here. I packed my old iPad in the hospital bag when my first was born, thinking (ridiculously, as I look back) I might have some downtime to study. Now he’s in first grade and learning characters himself, and his brother isn’t far behind. Let me put in another STRONG request to include the auto-add functionality in the new app. Or, at the very least, not to disable access to the legacy app, which, while not exactly pretty anymore, has worked well for me for many years.
The particular aspect of Skritter that I’ve found most effective is the spaced repetition at the very early intervals, right when a new item is making the transition from short term to long term memory. I see a new item, give a bit of thought to it (not much), then mark it wrong. The next card then comes up, which is a true “review”; i.e., I have about a 90% chance of getting it right, but it still requires some effort to recall. The effort of recalling a few “review” items has the effect of pushing the new item just to the fringe of my short term memory. After about 30 seconds or so of this, the new word shows up again, and there’s an almost physical sensation where my brain was about to forget it, but something screams “WAIT, no, don’t hit delete, we need that!” The old algorithm hits this sweet spot beautifully; and it happens 4 or 5 times at progressively longer intervals until by the end of my commute, the new word is usually sufficiently fixed in my memory that the next day, it can serve in the “review” role in between the early, super short intervals of the next new words.
I think I basically understand the proposed work-around (marking as “learned” even though it is not actually “learned”), though I must say that isn’t intuitive to me. But that’s beside the point, because even with the work-around, the very short early intervals don’t seem to happen because “review” doesn’t update itself dynamically (i.e., you have to clear every review that was due at the beginning of the session before the app considers the dueness of things that you got wrong in that session.) A work-around I used for a bit while trying to give the new app a chance involved exiting the review session and starting a new one every 30 seconds or so to force it to recalculate. That’s extremely tedious, made more so by the fact that the time-spent counter/clock seems to have been removed from the interface. (Separately, I disagree with this decision, since my goals are based on time spent, having dispaired of regularly clearing everything that as due.)
I didn’t play with “review continuously,” as I didn’t see the setting before I read this thread. It does sound like that behaves in a similar way to restarting the session every 30 seconds (though is it able to recalculate without a network connection, like the old app did?), and coupled with a way to add and “mark as learned” in bulk, it might work reasonably tolerably.
Trying it now, I second the view that “review continuously” feels endless without a progress bar or due count. It would seem sensible to bring back the clock for “review continuously,” since there’s already an empty space at the top of the screen where the due count would appear in the default mode.
I think I now understand why these design decisions were made: “We see a clear distinction between the process of learning something for the first time, and reviewing it to help it stick in long-term memory.” If I’m understanding correctly, you mean there was a deliberate and conscious decision to remove spaced repetition from “learning,” and do SRS only for things only for things that have been learned by other means (“In-app videos, high-quality example sentences (with audio), grammar points, guided stroke order support.”) I think this decision is fundamentally wrongheaded. For me, removing spaced repetition from the process of learning completely eviscerates the utility of Skritter. Please reconsider.
A totally unrelated minor nitpick: in the old system, it used to be possible when doing writing practice to mark a word as wrong without marking any of its component characters wrong. There doesn’t seem to be a way to do that anymore, and I would miss that feature. But I can see how that one might be considered overly complicated.
I second this point as well. I’m giving the new app a chance, but I’m finding that for all the reasons discussed I like the legacy app more for my learning goals.
Thank you @dbkluck for articulating so clearly and in detail the many commendable features of the legacy app that have not been brought forward into the new app.
For long-term users, the legacy app is so efficient: just launch into your daily study routine, adding new words whenever you get bored or let the algorithm add them for you, trust the algorithm to meet your learning needs just in time, then when the timer hits your set study interval, quit until tomorrow.
Simple, elegant, brilliant, and exactly what we need to keep using Skritter.
I gave the Skritter Beta another go, and I reverted again to the legacy application. I guess the main points are:
I ll keep an eye on the updates and give the Skritter Beta app another go in the future if these things improve.
I second that the fonts in the beta app are somewhat too small and the look and feel is not optimal (yet?).
The new learn mode is enjoyable in a way that when studying from a list from a book, when going through vocabulary which comes from chapters in the book, it allows a structured learn approach of new vocab. When I finish another chapter in the book, I head to the Learn mode and go through parts of that chapter’s vocab. However, I never use the test mode as it seems redundant when still having to keep up with the review stockpile.
The result is that I use Learn mode but due to lack of time And not finding Test mode worthwhile I barely get to see the newly Learnt vocab in review mode as my stockpile is too big.
For general advance through unstructured lists I also clearly prefer the legacy review mode with auto add. If this could be an option for the beta app it would be great.
What would be nice is to study a couple of new vocab focusedly in Learn mode and then head to Review with the recently Learnt vocab popping up prominently with SRS during that Review session.
Ok so I gave Skritter Beta yet another shot, this time with the mindset that I will have no choice but using it in the future. I guess I found how to make it work for me, and didn’t revert to the Skritter legacy app, so I thought I would share.
First of all, I spent some time tuning the settings of Skritter so it works for me:
Then, I use the following workflow:
This sounds like a good flow!
Thank you so so much for providing your workflow method. I’ve struggled with adapting to the new app and this will really help.
The only problem is how much longer this is going to take each day and how much more complicated than the legacy app this is. It is dismaying, but given the new system, sounds like it is not possible to make it any smoother for long-term users.
I just wish Skritter had thought in their redesign to incorporate a “long-term” or “advanced user” mode that emulates the ease of the legacy app use.
For now, at least until individual character mnemonics make it into the new app, I have to go on using the legacy app.
All I have to do every day right now is: add new words to my list from my reading, select the list(s) I want to study in “advanced study” mode, and launch in.
The legacy algorithm does the rest for me, and I just stop when I reach half an hour each day (in Skritter time.)
Like you, I mark all new words/characters as “wrong” initially to guarantee that they will make frequent repeated appearances on the same day I just learned them.
And I stop at all new words to take a time out in Pleco to study the many different word meanings and to copy them into the Skritter definition space.
It sounds like the biggest change Skritter has made to the new system is to abandon the tried-and-true algorithm. @SkritterJake, Is that the case?
So, is the SRS system actually serving your needs? I’m a little confused because your workflow is not the typical behavior, and you’re gaming the system to get what you want by marking all new words as wrong, rather than giving them an honest grade and trusting the system to sort things out.
Also, by relying on Advanced Study rather than just “Study” you’re neglecting every other word that is due for study in the flow you’ve described.
Sorry if I’m a little lost. What is the tried-and-true algorithm? Because what you’ve described above is not the way that Skritter was built to work. What you’ve described is a study flow that you’ve made for yourself to serve your needs. Makes sense, I did the same thing when I was using Skritter in grad school. I had a million little hacks to get items I wanted to see into my queue when I wanted them. But, it was my own unique way of studying, and it often took a 45-minute lecture to teach the nuances of the how and why of the flow.
Here is the workflow you’re describing:
Note, there are more taps than this but I’m keeping it basic
Here is a similar study flow to what you’ve described if I were doing what you did in the new app:
Note, there are more taps than this, but I’m keeping it basic
Honestly, the first flow sounds totally fine, but the total due items and the total due things you’d like to learn in a day is a giant X factor. Your goal is time-based as you’ve said, so taking a day off (or more), or over-studying for a single day is likely to have a tremendous impact on what happens during that 30 minutes.
The difference between the first flow and the second flow is that the second flow can be done every day with close to the same results every time, and with perfect information along the way. Not only does this mean that you know precisely what is getting added to your queue, but you also control the pace. New things are not added randomly. I know this might be a selling point for individuals, but it makes testing, and customer support A LOT harder for the business.
Added bonus, since the flow is the same for everyone it is easy to test. So, if anything goes wrong, we can fix it for everyone. And, if someone asks us how Skritter works. We can tell them with 100% certainty how things will happen, and why. That is much less possible with some of the study flows that have been described in this thread in particular.
Don’t rule it out. We’re making updates and improvements to the app, and I make a point of reading about, or inquiring into, nearly all of our feedback. I know I say this often, but we’re a small team. There is only so much we can do in a given day, week, month. We’ve got two developers, and there are a lot of moving pieces.
This new app is a 100% rewrite. With the new API, and a full understanding of how the system works because we built it as a team, it is a lot easier to add new features and build upon this app than the alternative of trying to make an old app and old API we didn’t write work in new ways it was never intended for.
Sadly, it is a process, and it is taking much longer than initially anticipated.
The plan, for now, is to keep working on things we have in the pipeline (see here). If enough users STILL are not convinced that we’ve done well after the app is fully built I will be sure that the OG Skritter study flow is in the app as an option for all.
-Jake
Analysis of sequences as steps might be useful, but it can also confuse since we really just want to spend less time making decisions in menus. (At least this is how I interpret the comments made by Therebackagain, but it is possible that I am projecting my own feellings on someone else.) I have the new Japanese app and I like where it is going, but I have been reluctant to become a Chinese beta tester for reasons that make it easy for me to sympathize with Therebackagain. This morning, however, I came up with a solution that might make the new app acceptable to me (so now I am a beta tester!).
I use Skritter several times every day, sometimes for two minutes, sometimes for ten, or even fifteen. If I were to use … let’s call it a many steps and different modes approach, I would first need to ask myself where I left of last time. What mode should I choose? Suppose that I am about to start a two minute session, but waste thirty seconds of it on trying to remember what mode I am due to use. I hope anyone reading this can understand that it would be a bit annoying. (It’s probably less annoying if you only use Skritter for one long session every day.)
The solution, as I see it, is the continuous mode that has now been turned into a mode in its own right with a nice button to click and with a timer. (Just like Therebackagain I count minutes rather than items.) So far my idea looks like this:
Every time I am about to start a session I look at the number of due items. IF it is unlikely that it will reach zero during this session, THEN use continuous mode. IF it is likely to reach zero THEN go to learn mode first.
This is not going to work for you, @Therebackagain since you have a lot of due items you don’t care about, but perhaps you can find some kind of principle that works for you. I guess that what I am trying to say is that for our needs, the continuous mode is probably the solution, since it works more like the old app. I also imagine that it will be easier to find solutions if we ask ourselves how the continuous mode can be improved, and give feedback from that angle. Is it acceptable to switch between two modes or do we need to argue for the addition of a bulk-add version of learn mode embedded within the continuous mode? Can we use continuous mode and still know when we want to add new content? Or do we need to see the number of due items like in the old days? And so on.
Thanks for the detailed reply and for talking through your process!
Review. Always review. Whether daily due cards or continuous. If you’ve gotten to the point where due cards are zero, and you’ve got another two minutes, then you jump into a recent deck on the Home screen to add some new stuff to learn.
That’s the teacher in me talking, btw. If you only have a few minutes to spend, you’re going to be much better off maintaining existing vocabulary and keeping things fresh. Cards are due for a reason, and those should be prioritized.
Now that we’ve separated Continuous Review, it is a lot easier to conceptualize a bulk-adding system inside this particular mode as well. Honestly, much of the work we’re doing at the moment is trying to increase the variety of ways you can study Chinese and Japanese using Skritter. Daily Review, Continuous Review, and Time Attack are just the beginning of what is possible.
Keep the feedback coming, everyone. I appreciate all of the posts on this thread. And I trust that we’ll be able to come up with some great solutions together as a community!