Since I'm graduating university this month I just passed the last part of my formal Mandarin training and I'm continuing by myself. I'm coming back to Skritter because I'm in need of a good SRS to support my self-study. Hello everyone, I'm back! =D

1. Apart from using Skritter, I use Anki for learning example sentences that use all kinds of idioms/grammar/sayings to actively master these. No writing, just memorization. Skritter is nice for learning characters but I feel that other parts of the language are learnt better by memorization through SRS. Anyone else doing the same? Thoughts?

2. I would very much like to hear your comments on my method above and hear about your own study habits. I currently use Chinesepod, movies, series and books as a source for Skritter/Anki entries. Do any of you use other materials, like school textbooks or other web services? And what do you usually do when your deck passes about 3000 entries, do you throw away entries that you've mastered? I tend to create really big decks, get squashed by the enormous workload, have the whole thing break down and start all over again. (should change this habit >.<)

Also, here are some random tips: For anyone who didn't check it out yet, Lang-8 allows you to get instant feedback on your Chinese written texts by native speakers, it's a great penpal alternative:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ykTbEPSjT5A
http://lang-8.com/

Some people like iKnow to improve their passive knowledge, maybe you'll like it. It's very simple, but it's sleek and comes with good sentences and audio:
http://iknow.jp/home

I'm using mental case instead of anki.
Make the flash cards on flash card exchange or in mental case on mac then copy to iphone/ipad.

I'm still a beginner.My main problem is not getting enough speaking practise.
The TAFE (technical college) class I'm doing has two , two hour classes a week but only a bit of reading aloud.

Class uses both Short-term Spoken Chinese 1 & 2: Threshold - almost finished it


Still having trouble with sentence order and making my sentences way to long.

@alxx See what you can do to find a language exchange partner. I meet with mine a couple times per week where we speak in English for an hour and then Chinese for an hour. It helps out a lot and allows for natural conversation (which, especially as a beginning student, rarely happens in a classroom - hello, my name is blah blah blah, i have two brothers, i like apples).

@alxx As an alternative to a language exchange partner and if you have the money, there are lots of services that can hook you up with a Chinese teacher online. Chinesepod, http://www.chinesehour.com, http://www.chineseteachers.com/ etc.

Is it just me? I always run into words which mean exactly the same or very close. If the English query is "but", the answer could be 可是，不过，但是.

Another issue is for instance 妒嫉 and 嫉妒, both with the same definition: "begrudge; envy; be jealous".

Does anyone have a method to cope with this?

Yep, change the definition to make it clearer? Also, are all the permutations of this distinct/important enough? I'd probably just add 忌妒 as it's more common than 妒忌 妒嫉 or 嫉妒? I'd also add a note like (also written 嫉~, 反过来也可以).

I'm trying to catch up my 3000 remaining reviews. In the process, I have to mark a lot of characters as wrong, because I forgot a lot. However, the characters that I mark as wrong don't even show up today or in the following days. It's not going to stick in my brain if Skritter doesn't at least show it again today or in the coming days.

Can I have Skritter test me on cards that I failed today within 10 minutes, in a few hours and tomorrow, something like that?

William,

Reviews are based on an algorithm. What you're asking for is a custom tweak to the algorithm for you, which is a pretty impractical solution for the site designers.

What I would recommend is starring each character that you've forgotten. This makes a custom list of starred words. Then go to the "My Words" section, and click on "starred words." You can study these words alone to help cram them. That is the best solution that I can see with what is available.

Alex

Wouldn't it be a better algorithm if a failed card would come sooner in the deck?

If I fail a card today and Skritter will ask me next month, I will just fail it again.

That is not necessarily true. The algorithm measures how well you know a character, based on how well you were able to recall it previously.

For example, let's use the character 我. The last time you reviewed it correctly was after 1 year. Then the program shows it to you again after 1.5 years. You write it incorrectly. The program will dial back to to 1 year again (I'm estimating, this is not exact).

It would be extremely inefficient to review each character you miss again the next day. When you miss the character, you are reviewing it even though you missed it; this review will help you remember it later.

Of course, this doesn't apply to your situation, where it sounds like you've taken a long time off of reviewing Skritter. In which case, you are right, you aren't going to remember the character even a month later. But this is not normal use of the program; normal use assumes that you are using the program on a continuing regular basis.

It is for situations like this that Skritter has the star system. If you see a character that you just don't even know anymore, star it. Review your star list first thing the next time you study. I think that's the best way to get around your situation.

someone who's done this before might be able to offer more advice on the specifics, but there is an option to nuke your account and start over. i think there's a way to export all of your current, pre-nuking words into a custom list before you do it, and then after you've reset the account, just readd them all from that list, marking the words you know as "too easy" and the one's you've forgotten as "forgot." that should fix the problem you're having with forgotten words not coming up soon enough; depending on the size of your list that might be more efficient. as i said, though, i've never tried it, perhaps someone who has can comment on how to do it specifically, or how tedious it is to mark "4's" on all the ones you still know.

@william: I took a look and I think the reason you're not seeing the ones you marked wrong is because you've still got quite a backlog of words to go through, 2000+. Until you whittle those down, the ones you got wrong won't show up very often, because they're buried deep in that pile. There are a few things you can do to make getting through this backlog more manageable.

1. Catch up list by list. You can study a single list on its own and work on the words just in that list until you've caught up, then work to catch up on the others one at a time. You're studying multiple lists so this might work well for you.

2. Use Save Me. This will push your backlog back over a certain number of days that you specify. Make it long enough so that the words you get on any given day are manageable, so maybe over 25 days so you get about a hundred to go over per day. This will also allow you to add new words while you're reviewing all the old stuff, if you want.

3. Delete some of the lists. On the study page you can remove any given list and those words will be removed from study (unless they're in another of the lists you're still studying). Add them back later, the progress will be remembered when you add the words back so you're only temporarily removing them from study, if you want them back later.

4. Start over, deleting everything. All your progress will be erased and you can start studying from lists anew. It's up to you to decide if this is easier than the other options.

You might want to mix and match but between these you should be able to get back on track, given some time!

For those curious as to how the scheduling works on items you forget, there's a little info on this in the FAQ:

A grade of 1 ("don't know") gives you a next review interval about 25% as long as the one that was scheduled for this review, with a minimum of thirty seconds and a maximum of one week. If it's the first time you've seen an item, the default interval is ten minutes.

(And it goes on to talk about how these interval-adjustment factors changed and are slightly randomized and so on.)

When you have 3000 items due, it's just about the worst time to try to make sure you immediately relearn every character that you forgot. It's going to be more efficient for Skritter to wait a few days before giving you those forgotten ones again. It'll give you more of a chance to get the reviews in on the ones you do know and get them out of the way before you settle into the work of relearning forgotten items. If you forget them a second time in a row, the intervals will be much shorter, and you'll start having your hands full with them.