Hi,

I'm starting with Skritter and I find it a really interesting application. I'm a great fan of spaced repetition (I've been using Anki for some while now), and I think it's great that Skritter uses such a system to choose which cards to make me review.

However, I have a remark concerning what the Fool's Workshop calls the "Insatiability Flaw" of some SRS ( http://foolsworkshop.com/reviews/the-insatiability-flaw ). If I don't voluntarily stop studying, skritter constantly prompts me to study more characters. There seems to be no way to know when I've been studying "enough". According to spaced repetition, one should review an item when one is just about to forget it, but skritter makes me review items I don't need to.

Am I doing something wrong here? Is there a way to study only those items which are due (with maybe new items also)?

Skritter automatically schedules the characters so that you don't study them too much. It manages the scheduling so that you don't have to know whether you're studying enough.

In the practice page you can see how the scheduling is doing by hovering over the text that says when you last studied a word. It should be near 100% when you're reviewing things that you're just about to forget. If it's less than 100% Skritter is making you review things that you don't need to. Press "Too easy" when grading yourself if that happens and it should correct.

Once your queue's nearly empty, Skritter will start adding items automatically.

Hi meuhch! Welcome to Skritter.

If you have active vocab lists enabled, with the default settings, it'll be pretty hard to overpractice to the point where you're not getting much out of it. But some overpracticing does occur, precisely to help with the truancy problem described in the last part of that essay. If one is studying a lot, then in order to keep reviews down, one can start to clear reviews from the next couple days.

To know when to stop studying, the review bar should suffice--when that gets close to empty, you're good for reviews for the time being.

I had more strong indicators when overpracticing was happening and readiness was dropping below 60% or so, but people kept complaining that they just plain well wanted to keep reviewing, dangnabbit, and to leave them alone. Oh, well.

So yeah, the system is designed to be as flexible as possible so that by default, you don't have to worry about how long you practice (although the more regularly you do in terms of minutes per day, the more efficient it will be). For me, that's an advantage over other spaced repetition systems where I'd need to more manually control my studying and item adding.

And another note: make sure you're studying "everything" rather than just individual lists...

I have to admit I'm a little puzzled by the complaint on that web site; he doesn't refer to any specific programs but the way Anki and Skritter do it seems pretty reasonable. Skritter shows you when your "items to review" is at zero, and lets you add characters manually if you want complete control. Anki actually stops by default when you've reviewed everything that's due, and then gives you the option to "review early" or "learn more".

James