Hey all,

Simple question here. I'm wondering what the difference is, on the Progress screen, between the Characters graph and the characters row in the table below it. The graph says I know a lot more characters than the table says. I'd like to believe the graph, but how many do I really know?

James

You may be looking at the graph for the overall characters learned, but the table for just this current week, which is the default. Change the viewer to "year" (in the upper left hand corner of the Progress tab") and you should see agreement.

It probably says "Week" followed by "March 29, 2010 - April 4, 2010" at the top of the page. The table is displaying stuff you've learnt or added in the past week.

The progress chart however is cumulative, that is, displays a total of characters learnt, and not just the ones in the present week.

If you've been a member for more than a year, setting the viewer to "year" won't help unfortunately - you can't select a year long period unless you've been a member for all of the period, and so you can only select overlapping periods.

In the table that shows your stats on the progress page, in the first box of the dark blue bar at the top, there are two buttons total and range. If you hit total it will show you everything you have done up to now.

Thanks shinyspoons, that does it ;p

ximeng, if you set it to 'year' without being a member for that long, it just displays your total learnt over the entire period you've been a member.

Hitting 'total' in the upper left corner of the table will give you the overall total figures not matter what your current view is. It is not very obvious. It took me a few weeks before I dicovered this feature.

A related question: when Skritter counts how many words and characters that I know, are the sets of words and characters disjoint? That is, does the set of "characters" refer to the single character entries on my vocab list and the "words" refer to the entries with two or more characters? This is my guess, but I wanted to make sure.

That is also my understanding of it. So total vocab acquired is characters + words

Yes, for Chinese words are any words with two or more characters.

For Japanese though, we track knowledge of words and characters the other way, so if you add 水, for example, that counts as both a word and a character.

When I learn 你好, does that automatically add the two characters to the total of known characters, or does that only happen when I add each of 你 and 好 individually?

It adds them to your learned total, yeah. They won't come up by themselves, but they're tracked.