it usually says that there are about 30-50 words due in a given day. This morning it said there were almost 200 due. Anyone know why?

And also, sometimes it will say "50 due today", but when I stop going through the list half way in, the next time I look at it, the number is totally different.

Mysterious

Haven't seen any higher number today but usually when that happens I have added a lot of new words the days before. I think i average some 2-300 due a day. About different numbers i think that is happening if you reply wrong on some parts. They will then come back again early and that affect the due count. I am not sure but I think if I get a word wrong i will also get the characters in that word to practice on and that would increase the number.

I average 300-400 words/day. In my opinion it would be useful to have the option to set the maximun number of words per day you want.

At the moment I study on skritter 40-50 minutes per day, but in the next months I will have less time. So I would like to slow down the pace a bit without having to use the "Save me!" function too often, just by setting an optimal word number based on the time I have to study.

Would it be feasible?

Gilberto

@glacchia, I think it would be better to just over practice and start adding fewer words before you have less time to study. If you stop adding words right now and just practice what you have you'll eventually reduce your average words per day.

I too think it would be nice if we can set a maximum number of characters that can be due in a single day, or else it might get a little impractical.

The problem with the idea of a maximum is that the SRS algorithm wouldn't support something like that - it would force the system to reevaluate your schedule based on how many items are due, which would harm the effectiveness of the SRS algorithm because it would be artificially checking itself.

It's by no means a necessity to keep up with your queue, but if you feel the absolute necessity to study for a certain amount of time and zilch out your reviews queue every day, you'll have to figure out from experience just how much new material you can add in a day without overreaching yourself for the next day. If you add too much new stuff, or if you binge study one day, you're going to find it affecting your reviews in the future.

Personally, after hitting 2500 or so reviews due about a month ago, I'm comfortable with a review queue of 500+, since I can always add new words manually if I want to keep the new stuff flowing.

All too often I get involved in other activities or am traveling and can't Skritter for a week or so. When I come back I usually work down my few thousand words due by three or four hundred a day until I clear it to zero again.

I think if you let items sit in your due list and build up their % due, if you get them right when you get to them you push them back much further than otherwise. This has helped me keep my queue down significantly in the long run. I'm also sure to hit 4 or change characters to blue (easy) when they are too easy for me. Of course, beware that taking long vacations may cause you to forget the last week's worth of new words.

If the number of items due is just a number, why do we care? I think it's because seeing the number of items due stresses us out and makes us feel guilty. But this is just psychological; we can choose to ignore it and practice in the same way. If you have Skritter set to add automatically it should (I think) reduce the frequency with which it adds new items until you get your review queue down.

The number is very useful, though. If you add items manually or cram new items all the time, you can get yourself in trouble with an ever-growing queue, and the number of items due will tell you when you've added too much new stuff too soon.

Also, to build on FatDragon's comments, the whole idea of SRS is that items are scheduled based on the amount of time that has passed, not on when they're convenient for us to study. Let's say for example that I manually add or cram 10 new words a day and don't review enough. Then my review queue will tend to get longer and longer because there are items waiting for review that I'm not getting to. Then if I could tell Skritter "only show me a maximum of 20 items per day" I would fall even further behind, but I would have the added problem of not knowing how far behind I was.

This is what eventually happened to me with flash cards. I have thousands of flash cards, mostly from studying Spanish, in boxes which sit in the closet, and I have no idea which of those cards are super-easy and don't need to be reviewed, and which are due for a review. Nowadays I use Skritter and Anki to manage this kind of thing, and have learned that adding lots of new stuff to study results in huge review queues later, so now I have to pace myself better.

@glacchia mcfarljw is right, you'll need to stop adding new stuff some time before you go on vacation. See this older thread for a few more details on what to do when you're going on a long vacation: http://www.skritter.com/forum/topic?id=34276339

James

I plan on doing the ultimate version of that before grad-school. I plan on not adding any new words for at least 4 months before hand. I then plan on just running the queue to try to get everything beaten down. The idea is to get my Skritter maintenance levels manageable for the next 6/7 months while taking formal classes. I am not going for a degree with anything having to do with Chinese. After that, you just add a couple of hours per week of a one on one Skype class for keeping your tongue loose and hopefully I won't lose too much during the regular semesters.

@west316 what are you studying? I studied math and for me grad school was quite a shock... something like drinking from the fire hose.

I am currently in the process of applying for law. I want to focus on international law.

The workloads are insane during the first year. I was studying ten hours a day while I was in Beijing, though. We'll see...

Hm, I've been 'suffering' from the backlog problem for about half a year now after a longer vacation. First I was quite annoyed by it. After a while I kind of got used to living with a few hundred characters under my 'learn everything tab'.

With thirty minutes a day (which in real time actually turns out to be almost an hour for me) I manage to get through about 100 characters. I get between 50 and 100 characters for review per day. Following two longer vacations in the first half of this year (lucky me :) I now managed to get my backlog down from about 1400 to 600 characters.

The only drawback is that I have not been adding new characters nor words for half a year (I suppose the backlog is too significant for the system to add new ones). However with around 900 'learned' characters as a basis and thanks to skritter I am doing pretty OK with HSK reading lvl 4/5 in terms of character recognition but still need to work quite a bit on vocab.

@hannes - I would strongly recommend one of three things: you either take a couple opportunities to overstudy and get your queue down so you're adding new items again, you use the "save me" button (my recommendation), or you start adding new words manually. Spending some time after a vacation maintaining the stuff you've already started studying makes sense, but spending 6 months maintaining it without learning anything new is too long.

If you've maintained 600+ reviews due for 6 months, then 600 is actually your zero, since the stuff that's "due" is based on a schedule that's been in advance of your actual studies for a long time. Hitting "Save Me" should adjust everything so that your Skritter schedule fits your actual study schedule, and it would allow Skritter to add new words for you at a rate that reflects your actual studying pace, rather than not adding words because you're always behind an outdated schedule.

Yeah I agree, it seems to work better if you try to get the massive post-vacation queue down to absolute zero, which can take me a while if you're like me and have lots of other non-Skritter stuff to do after you get back from vacation.

Thanks for your advice fatdragon and jww1066. Will give it a big push one of these days. It is just that finding more than one hour a day is actually not that easy for me but was has to be done has to be done!

@hannes: perhaps you should try lowering your retention rate. I changed it from 97% to 92% and it was a major major change in # of items due every day.

Thanks for the hint. My personal retention rate is in the low seventies. Although I lowered the target retention rate this will have not much effect until I get closer to it I suppose.

Anyways my backlog is now around 500 characters only, progress! With the Chinese holidays coming up I should have a good chance of getting the queue back to normal.

Thanks for all your advice!

I try to control my queue by adding new words manually, and the rate at which I add them changes based on the size of the queue. Since I've been fairly regular, it hasn't come into play much, but if I have a huge queue, I might not add anything at all or maybe once every hundred queue items. If the queue is small, I might add once every 25 or 10 items. I try not to go overboard... adding a bunch of items today will probably cause the queue to shoot up in a week or two.