At Leiden University students were / are required to learn seven new characters each day.

If I wanted to study like this on a daily basis, I suppose I'd have to use the scratchpad; or is the option 'practice' --> 'everything' actually just as good? Just asking to make sure, since I would prefer the latter.

How about making a custom list of say the next 100 characters you need to learn over the next couple of weeks and then setting add words to manual? You could manually add seven characters every day that way and continue to use the basic practice all button.

I am currently going through old text books that way. I have the start next section set to manual. I just do one chapter a day.

No, practice everything is many times better than the scratchpad. It will auto schedule characters for you, so you'll review them when need be.

Yeah, always use "practice everything" unless you have a good reason not to. (Example: you are cramming for a quiz tomorrow which will only have specific characters on it.)

Learning seven new characters a day won't be that hard: remembering them will be.

Thanks for your replies.

west316: I shall try it like this.

Byzanti: I can well imagine you're right, but do I know this way how many characters I'm dealing with in a session? I'm asking this because characters are added while I'm practicing, so ultimately I may be dealing with some ten characters at a time... It seems to me that the scratchpad may be a good preliminary stage to the 'practice all' feature.

jww1066: I quite agree.

icecream: I guess you're right, but maybe the extra focus delivered by the scratchpad will make things a bit easier?

Hi LHM, I would love to receive first hand feedback on the first year of studying Chinese in Leiden. What is it you are expected to know by the end of year 1 ?

(I'm dutch, living and working in NL)

Michael

7 characters per day shouldn't be that bad. @west316's method makes sense - I would be cautious about adding other characters/words besides what you are studying in class to keep your time spent manageable.

Ideally you would get several days ahead and keep your review queue down. It shouldn't take that much time - maybe 10-15 minutes in the morning and 10-15 in the evening every day give or take depending on how long it takes you to remember things.

Practice everything is what you want to do (so that you'll remember what you've learned) and I'd add all 7 characters first thing in your first practice session of the day.

LaughingHorseman, you can turn adding to "Manually" in the "active lists" menu while you're practicing. (It's pretty hidden, I know--we're redesigning that, too.) Then words will only be added when you hit the button.

I would recommend adding seven characters a day but in advance of your class by a few days, by the way. Skritter takes a while to get you solid on the things you add, so a bit of a lead helps.

From the way you write it seems like you are new to both SRS and Skritter.

If you don't have a character list and don't feel like building one, start here:

http://www.skritter.com/vocab/list?list=agVza3JpdHIWCxINVm9jYWJMaXN0SW5mbxj59_kNDA

It's a list of 3000 common characters arranged in order of frequency.