Hi everyone, long time no see!

I've just had almost a year off Skritter while I finished my degree and started a new job (not really an excuse, I know!) but I'm finally ready to come back to regular Skrittering.

So, does anyone have any tips for getting back into it successfully? It's pretty tough to dive back in from months of zero studying, especially now that I don't take evening classes any more (London is too expensive!). I know about the Save Me feature and have read previous posts about catching up after a few days or weeks off, but when it's been months I'm less concerned about the huge backlog of reviews than finding effective ways to get back to the level I was at. Has anyone had a similar experience?

P.S. Looking forward to being Skritter-obsessed again, it still impresses people every day on the tube and at work! Enjoying the app even more on iOS7, still looking great and very fast :)

Took me a similar amount of time as malaili to get 3000+ reviews under control with an hour a day and not adding any new items. I'm now getting my recall percentage up and then plan to start adding characters again for the first time in years. I hope to get towards 3500 characters from just under 2000 in 6 months. I plan to focus mostly on character writing, but will incorporate some TV watching / pronunciation practise for variety. Probably won't take classes for now, but will consider it after my characters get up to scratch. That's the plan for now at least!

I would be tempted to delete all of your word lists and start all over again. I did it a while ago after a few months of very little Skrittering. It felt good to reinforce the stuff I did know well, and I could slowly reintroduce the words I actually wanted to learn.

This time around I am being more careful about which words I actually want to learn to write, not just indiscriminately adding every interesting or fun word I find.

Welcome back Catherine...am still waiting for those breeze books from you!

Hi
Welcome back. I also joined back a few months ago and for the hint from the skitter people to nuke my account. For me it worked fine. I guess it's all about psychology. Do you prefer to see 3,000 reviews pending and needing weeks and weeks to get on top of them and potentially starting from some relatively complicated kanji. Or do you get motivation from seeing a steep learning curve as you restart from 0 in skitter and add very fast words back in. I am happy with the approach I took as it brought the kanji back in a logical order. But I guess it depends how much you had learned/have forgotten.

I would consider nuking the account. I took six months off once and got very frustrated with the backlog. It wasn't so much that it was large, but that I got all of them wrong (because I forgot them), but then didn't see them again because of all the other items.

No one would suggest that you add several thousand new words all at once, but tackling your backlog will effectively be the same.

Rather than nuking you could also remove all lists and then slowly add them back one at a time. I don't know if there is a way to slowly let the words from a list back into your studies, or if re-adding a list dumps hundreds of words into your pool of active cards.

If you remove all your lists and then add them all again, Skritter will think you have a completely empty vocab queue and will add the same words back again one at a time.

Your stats will still show all those old words as remembered though, so won't change until you learn genuinely new stuff. I think you can ask the Skritter team to reset your stats if this bugs you.

You could always download your vocab list before you nuke and save it somewhere if you want to remember where you were for old times sake.

Alan, are you sure about this? If I add a list full of vocab that I have already added once before and I ask Skritter to add a word, won't it start at the beginning of the list and go through until it finds a genuinely new word? I suspect the default behaviour is to dump all of the previously-studied words into your active pool at once. I further suspect that by playing with the "start adding from section X" setting that you can restrict it to dumping only a section at a time.

Alan, just to be clear, I am talking about the situation where you remove a list and add it back again without nuking the account. (I know the list completion dates are inaccurate after a nuke.)

Alan is correct. I had about 3000 words in my list when I stopped using Skritter over a year ago. This year I came back and deleted all of my lists (but didn't nuke my account), and then added them all again. Skritter only added the words one at a time, even though they had all been added and studied before.

That's awesome! Thanks.

Thanks for the advice guys. I think I'm not going to take any drastic measures at the moment, because with the help of the app, I've already got rid of 700 reviews just in a couple of days commuting. In the past, it's been demoralising to be faced with my most recently added (therefore unknown) words, but perhaps it's just because I've been away so long that I'm getting pretty easy reviews at the moment which is actually very motivating :).

@xiaomai5 - Wow, I had totally forgotten about those books, I think that was like two years ago... that's embarrassing! I do remember putting them in an envelope but it must have never made it out the door. I'll have a look at home but I honestly don't have a clue where they are I'm afraid :(.

Try the goal mode, too, if you're on the web version. People reported liking it, so it's due for port to the iOS version, but hasn't happened yet.

http://www.skritter.com/newsletters/13-10

no worries! Glad to see you back, enjoy learning! :-)

Skitter obsessed? Obsessed with kanji / Chinese characters? Really? Btw what's the tube? The subway? I'm trying to get obsessed too but I don't know if I'll get there again. I was obsessed when I was learning RTK for the first time but that's because the results were fast but vocabulary is another thing entirely.