Skritter says on average people can remember a character every 54secs, does anyone find this realistic? A lot of my characters take 3 or 4 minutes, am I just slow or is this an unrealistic target?

i think it takes longer.

but again thats average... some words are just learnt faster (like 1,2,3, or mouth ...)

Yea I guess there is a lot of easy ones, but I came to skritter already knowing quite a lot of characters and there is no way I could get near 54seconds. Some characters are nearly 10minutes and still not learnt. Id like to know how that figure was worked out.

I assumed that was how they work it out. It's just a lot of mine are several minutes. So either I'm looking at them for a long time or reviewing them a lot and still not learning. I don't know if that figure is for learning the character as a whole (reading/writing/pinyin/tone) or just the meaning. Or over what period as I guess the more characters you learn the easier it is to learn new words.

Nevermind, I am very happy with how skritter has helped me, guess just wants to learn as fast as possible.

That's the thing about averages though, which of us is average?

I think I've noticed my brain slow now I'm in my 40s - things which I would pick up very quickly 20 years ago seem to take more time now. I guess my chinese learning is slower than the average, but it's fine for me and I'm happy with it (even if I do spend some time looking at a character, knowing that I DO know it, but just unable to access the part of my brain where this information is stored!)

When I started with Skritter almost 3 years ago, it took me even less: I already had learnt almost 1000 characters , but I started from the scratch, so that I had everything within Skritter. So for characters like 我，你，好，也，etc. it took me only one click to have it "learnt". I assume that there are many users doing the same.
Today, I definitely need more than 54 sec.
Also keep in mind that once you click "don't know" Skritter stops counting the time, but you still may look at the character to memorize it or even write it down several times on paper.
So don't worry about this statistics, Skritter definitely is for me the most efficient way to learn characters and words.

I wouldn't pay much attention to the average-- plenty of people come to Skritter already knowing or having some exposure to over a thousand characters, and are thus able to "learn" those in an incredibly short time-- which I presume shows up in the average.

The stat is that an average Skritter user learns an item every 54 seconds, not a character. Character writings take somewhat longer, character tones are usually faster, word definitions can be very fast, etc.

You'll have multiple items per character and word if you have multiple parts, so it's not saying that if you studied for 540 seconds, you'd have learned 10 new characters. You would have learned (if you're an average user) 10 new "things". It could be 10 new character writings, or it could be two new 2-character words' writings, tones, and readings, where each character inside also was a new tone.

That studying also includes all your old reviews, too, so only a small fraction of your time is spent on "new" items, and most on reviewing of old items.

Generally if you want to see how that rate compares for you, check your Progress Totals. Multiply the hours spent by 3600 and divide it by the sum of all the numbers in the "Learned" column to get your seconds-per-item stat. If you're relatively new to Skritter, especially if you knew some words before you started, it'll be disproportionately fast. If you don't do certain hard or easy study parts, it may be faster or slower. But it is an interesting personal stat.