Dear Skritter Team (and anyone else with input),

I was having moderate ease with a simple, one-dimensional use of Skritter:

1) I made my own personal vocab list and avoided publishing it so I could update it frequently (it took me three tries before I realized I needed to NOT hit "publish" if I wanted to edit it later).

2) Under "Practice" I always had cram mode turned on. Under this setting, I selected my personally made vocab list and studied it for a good week. The characters would come up in the same relative order, with some scrambling. No matter what I did or how many characters and tones I got right, it would test the same ones every time.

3) I'm thinking, "Hey, I want to actually track my progress and only study the characters I'm having difficulty learning". So, I turn off Cram mode and go into "SRS Practice" (what does SRS stand for, by the way?).

Here's where I encounter some frustration:

4) Random characters from "Integrated Chinese 2: Lesson 1" are showing up. Whoa. Why is this happening? I already know all of these words. Every time I draw them correctly, they just show up again in a few minutes.

5) Hmm, let me click on "active lists" and select only the lists I want to study. Okay, click the "play button" for the the custom list I made, and the "pause button" for all the others. Good.

6) What, what? No change? I'm still being tested on characters from "Integrated Chinese 2: Lesson 1"? Okay, let me go to the "Vocabulary" tab, select "Textbooks", and deselect "Integrated Chinese 2: Lesson 1". What? It's not checked off for me to study? That's odd.

7) Go back to the "practice" tab.

8) The same characters pop up from "Integrated Chinese 2: Lesson 1". I'm slowly beginning to see some characters from my custom list. For some reason, characters from the "HSK 4" list are also showing up, even though that has been deselected.

9) In short, what on earth is going on? Why doesn't the fact that I have deselected "HSK 4" and "Integrated Chinese 2: Lesson 1" prevent them from showing up in SRS practice? Do I seriously have to go to "Vocabulary" then "viewer" and manually deselect all the words I don't want to be tested on?

10) If this is the case, then the only utility your service can really provide for me without being a pain in the neck is through the cram setting, which frankly is too monotonous and doesn't reflect any sign of progress for me.

Any help would be much appreciated. Thanks.

Also, how can I get it to add all of the words from my custom list to the SRS practice at once, rather than slowly with one word added every few hours?

SRS = spaced repetition system. It's a way of presenting material to be memorized based on how likely you are to remember it. If you're likely to forget something quickly, it will come up more often. As you learn it better, it will come up less frequently.

The unwanted words continue to show up, because once added, they are in your vocabulary forever. You can delete them and they will not show up again. Deselecting lists from your active lists only controls what words are added to your vocabulary. As it says on the active lists panel: "These are the vocab lists that words will be added from during practice."

You can add a bunch of words at once by repeatedly clicking the little green "+" button next to the words-added progress bar.

Xerxes, thanks for the response. That clarifies a few things.

What would be nice is if we had the option of deleting the words from the SRS as we see them. I.e. if a word pops up during practice, we click a button and never have to see that word again. This would be much easier than the current system of navigating to "viewer" and selecting all the words we want to delete. Just a thought.

You can do that. Click on the little magnifying-glass icon next to the word when you see it. One of the options will be to delete the word.

There you have it. Thanks again for the help. I suppose I got a little ahead of myself :/

No worries Ibid, our vocabulary system is definitely not intuitive enough. Rapidly approaching on my to do list is a major overhaul of the current system.

The first thing I'm going to do is overhaul the SRS/Cram stuff. I'm going to make a practice navigation page that you land on when you click the practice tab. It will give you a set of options: study everything (the current default), study one list, study one section of one list, or study a given set of words entered on that page, a sort of "on the fly" list. These will replace the current cram system, so you won't have cram lists anymore, just one kind of vocab list.

Also, you will be able to remove lists from study from the practice page, either to just stop adding from them, or to stop studying from them as well. We encourage people to keep studying what they've already added, though, just so they don't forget the things they've spent so long studying! Words you know well should show up very infrequently as you study them. But this new page should make it much more simple to remove a list from study.

After this, I'll be working on rebuilding the list editing system and doing some major upgrades for the queue. Hopefully once this is all done, we won't have as many confused users! We hope you'll like it!

Scott,

Thanks for the update. The changes sound like they'll make navigation much easier and user-friendly. Very much look forward to it :)