I get the basics about how words you know is pushed further and further back in my list but are there any max limit for this? I nuked my account about a week ago and i have already a character, 菜, that will come back in 9 years. Nice. OK,this character is so extremely frequent in many combinations so it is showing up very frequent as part of words but anyway. Is there a max limit for how long in to the future a character can be pushed? I would actually love to have a feature to update that my self. e.g. tell the system to update all the words to come back in.e.g a year or so. There are characters that my brain will remember today but i probably will forget in the coming years.

How did you find out that 菜 got pushed back 9 years for you? Where did you go on Skritter?

Go to Vocabulary / Viewer. Click on the "next" section to sort the list in order when a character should appear the next time. Unfortunately we can't sort the list in reverse order so you have to click next/next/next on the list until you are at the end. There might be better/faster ways to do it but this is what I did just for fun. Just to calm my curiosity i guess.

"Is there a max limit for how long in to the future a character can be pushed? I would actually love to have a feature to update that my self."

Indeed, one of my pet wishes. The starred characters help but it's hard to know ahead of time which characters might be problematic, and of course the starred characters then clutter up normal practice.

Also never really understood the relationship between forgetting how to write a word (forgetting which characters form it) and how to write a character, wrt to your other post.

@阿福 as for the other post. That where not about forgetting. That where about grading how well i know it to avoid having it back to early. Both characters and words.

If you study something enough and it gets scheduled for let's say nine years into the future, you basically don't have to worry about it any more. Consider it "permanently known" and work on something new.

When you're tackling a difficult language like Chinese, you need to be really careful about managing your time. Don't waste time studying things that you already know.

James

"If you study something enough and it gets scheduled for let's say nine years into the future, you basically don't have to worry about it any more. Consider it "permanently known" and work on something new."

I disagree on that. At least for me, the "提笔忘字 syndrome" also affects surprisingly simple characters.

TANSTAAPKC: There ain't no such thing as a permanently known character.

I agree, TANSTAAPKC haha. 9 years is excessive for the character 菜. You might think you know a character well, but later down the road when you learn "similar looking" characters you might find you know it much less than you originally thought. For example; 菜 and 采.

The variations on known character throw me for a loop sometimes, but it'd be quite difficult to incorporate similar looking characters into the SRS algorithm. But it would be cool to have a new characters also degrade similar characters to truly test for accurate distinction.

The character will come up as a part of a word before then. That's why it appears pushed so far back.

@Mandarinboy Thanks!

If you're constantly writing it as part of a word, and constantly writing the pinyin as part of a word, then I can understand why writing/definition/tone might be pushed back nine years.

However, for characters that are also stand-alone words, their definition should be somehow parsed out and treated as separate data points, since you're never really tested on the definition of the *character* when it's part of a larger word.

@jcdoss that's why there's an option "Also Add Characters When Adding Words"

As for the nine years thing; isn't the assumption that we are actually going to be using Chinese outside of Skritter? If you don't naturally run into a character in nine years, you don't need to know it.

James

I believe Nick once posted that there is a plan to implement a "test me" button. Presumably, from time to time, you could just hit that button and then spend a week or two going through all "you know." That is their answer to the maximum age problem.

I currently get around this by just adding tons of words with each character I know. It isn't on purpose, but it sort of just happens when I am uploading various lists. I value words far more than characters. The only down side to this is that it makes your review queue much longer.

A "test me" button would be amazing when you have some time and just want to review everything once and see how you do.