Hi, this is a new problem I’ve just starting noticing, and it’s really eating up a lot of my study time. It seems recently that the SRS algorithm has changed so that I’m getting way more tone questions than writing reviews.
Yesterday I started out with 322 items in my queue, and no joke I think over 300 of them were drawing tone. Tones are important to me, but this is way overboard, and there doesn’t seem to be anything I can do to reduce the reviews appreciably–even if I just mark everything “easy,” I still see the same terms repeatedly in the same day’s queue.
This creates another problem: I can’t even be honest about which tones I miss and which ones I get right, because if I allow one marked “forgot” to slip by, then it’s going to come back 20 times in the next 5 minutes or until I mark it “too easy” at least 3 times in a row. If I miss a character on the written review, by comparison, I just have to get it right a couple of times in a row, and then if it persists in showing up too often, I hit “too easy” maybe once or twice, and I don’t see it again until the next day.
Also: it used to be that if a new term came up, and I got it right, then I didn’t see it again for quite a while, and if I marked it “easy” on the first appearance, I didn’t see it again for maybe weeks. This doesn’t work with tone reviews. Those suckers come back no matter what, day after day after day.
If this sounds like nitpicking, I’ve done over 100,000 reviews in the last 4 months, so this adds up to serious time lost. I noticed the 2.0 app allows you to click to the next item without doing anything with it, but how does that get counted? It’d be great to hit “too easy” without having to answer the question first–it’d save some time, anyway–as long as it doesn’t affect the SRS down the line. IOW, if I skip past a review and it gets counted as “forgot/didn’t know,” that would actually be harmful overall.
One final wish list suggestion: would it be possible for users at some stage to choose a skill level? As it is, if a new item is added to my list and I get it wrong, it’s treated like a word I’ve never seen before, and it comes up over and over until I lose patience and start marking it “easy.” (again, much more so with tone reviews). The thing is, at this point in my studies there aren’t many characters I haven’t practiced exhaustively already, but with 4000-6000 of them jostling around in my memory, it’s common to lost track of them here and there. I see the correct entry and then I think,“Oh, it’s THAT one,” and then I’ve got it for at least the next day or two. It’d be nice if Skritter could be set to drill missed characters less relentlessly if you just miss it once.