I got my big review pile down to about 120, but then Skritter kept adding new characters. I can't seem to get it any lower - in fact it's getting bigger. Every time I'm making progress it adds new characters. Is this intentional? It makes the review bar a bit useless, as it's always 100% blue. Perhaps a scale would be helpful on the review / added bars. They often just fill up for me and I end up hovering my mouse over them to find out how many characters have been added / are ready to review.

I have a similar problem, but even with everything paused and no new characters added, my review pile is not going down. So if for example Skritter tells me that I have 97 items to review, I can spend 1/2 hour going through, say, 150 characters with, say, 75% success rate, and my review total has gone down to... 96.

I'll be investigating and fixing this one today. It may be a combination of two problems: review bar display not updating properly, and the Genius too-aggressively adding new words early.

Thanks, Nick. The problem I seem to be having seems to be with the review bar, and not with the aggressive addition of new words, as this continues to be a problem even when all of my lists are paused.

I am having no luck at all reproducing this bug. Is it still doing it? Does the review bar stay dead on refresh? What words is it giving you to practice?

I made some tweaks to the Genius to be less aggressive on the default setting. Let me know if it's still in a pattern of adding too much, ximeng.

We'll put the numbers onto the review and added bars soon.

Hi, Nick,

This still seems to be a problem. Just at the moment my review bar is staying almost static at around 65, however many characters I test (sometimes it sits around 100, sometimes it sits around a little more, sometimes a little less.) So I can start working, the bar descends nicely as it always has done, and then at some point it just starts to fluctuate around a seemingly fixed point.

Here's a sample with the words being tested, and the review bar figure just after testing each during the last 10 or so minute period. The starred items are those marked new,

时差 63
部首 65
发明 61
屋子 63
贯彻 63
裘皮 63
丝绸 61
乘客 61
牺牲 61
罚款 59
奋斗 65
睡着 63
中式 65
报道 63
钥匙 65
降落 65
前门 67
礼貌 67
单人房 65 *
与日俱增 65
馒头 65
中国画 63 *
填 63
双人房 65 *
探 65
... and so on.

This seems odd. I can keep going for another half an hour, and I still get the review bar saying there are around 63-65 characters to test, with the small fluctuations either side. As you can see from the list, the adding of new characters/words doesn't seem particularly aggressive (only three words added in this sample).

I don't know if this throws any light on the problem.

All the best,

Will

58 宣布 x *
52 限制 (T) v
52 侯 (T) x
52 锻 (T) x
60 羊 (T) x
64 曾经 (C) v
64 关键 x/v *
60 阶段 x/v *
56 厨房 x/v *
52 错误 (C) v
57 瓶 (C) v
57 哭 (T) x
56 办公室 (C) v
58 贸易 （C) v
60 辆 (T) v
58 宣布 (T) v
59 公共 v *
56 宽 x/v *
55 迟 (C) v
58 鸟 v *
56 确 (C) x
62 阶段 (T) x/v
61 司机 v *
59 禁止 v/x *
53 厨房 (T) v
53 改革 (C) v
53 课本 (T) v
56 舒服 (C) v
60 讲话 v *
58 etc.

It seems to have got as far as it wants to. * for new character, v=got it right, x=got it wrong. It was pausing yesterday around the 120 mark, now it's about half that.

Ten minutes later at full speed (it's quite slow copying out the characters) I'm at 62 characters to review, with quite a few new ones added.

P.s. what's the time on the right and left for the character in a word? There's one (迹) just come up which I don't think I've seen before, on the left it has "5 hours", on the right it has "New".

Thanks guys, that's quite helpful. I thought I had it, with some timezone handling stuff, but now I'm not sure. I made the tiniest of tweaks, but I doubt that'll fix it. Please continue to report whether it happens, although no need now to say what the prompts were.

It seems the symptom is that the review bar is staying high, but you've actually cleared most of the stuff to review, and that's when it's adding everything. But in order to find where the problem is, it'd be helpful to know: once it starts sticking, and you practice a couple dozen characters, then when you refresh does it stay at the same number, or go down, and if it does stay at the same number, is it giving new ones at the same rate as it was just prior to refresh?

The time on the left is for the tone scheduling, on the right for the character writing scheduling. Those on the top are for the whole word, those on the bottom are for the individual character.

So is the time since last seen, or the time until it will be seen again? How can it have a tone scheduled but not character?

It'll be a while before I'm getting to the point of clearing my queue again but I'll try to remember to let you know then.

Last seen, although we may work the next interval in.

You'll only see last review times for those parts for which you're being prompted. The other items for that word or characters don't need to be loaded, so the client doesn't currently know what their review info is when it prompts you. Do you think it's important?

Not important, just a little confusing to see a character marked as new but the tone as not. I think if you're showing the information it should probably be accurate.

I think it would be interesting to see next after the review is complete (e.g. 5 hours, next in 10 hours).

Was around 360 for about 45 minutes, regularly giving out sets of new words.

It's mainly giving me recently added items for review, along with a small set of old items. It's repeating quite a few (some I'm getting wrong each time).

The vocab list has 360-odd items marked as ready (I sorted by next and clicked through all the ready ones).

Halfway through one set of new words I refreshed the page and it went from 365 to 361.

...

Now it's scheduling none of the recently added new words, or the old words it was scheduling. Instead I've got a mix of words from one day up to 5 weeks review time, and occasionally some from today, I think mainly when I've got the review wrong since the refresh.

The words it's giving me now are much more interesting to practice.

...

After Skrittering for 45 minutes after the review I'm down to 204.

And a couple of hours later I got to 0, and mostly stayed there, with Skritter throwing in the odd new word here and there but not excessively. Even when it went to zero it seemed to often give me review items rather than the string of new items it used to when queue length went to zero.

While I'm here, how about something like a super review/added bar, actually a graph.

With lines for total items reviewed this session, total items remaining for this session, total items added this session, all over session time. Then you'd have a stacked bar chart on the same axes of items to add and items to review in the ten minutes blocks, going into the future and session past.

At the moment I approximate the bars by glancing through the review list, but it's not too helpful.

By the way, I spotted 出 now has a next review time of 2 years. That seems like a long time, how did it get so high. I thought it doubled each time you do it.

Still getting some "sticking" over here, currently around 33 or so. It went down smoothly to that point, and then stuck.
It seems that if I take a break, then come back and have another go, it goes back down a bit more until it sticks at a lower level. Then another break, then it goes down a bit more until it sticks once again... and then it eventually gets to 0. But the next day, the sticking starts again.

Curiously the "items added today" also seems to give apparently random numbers.

I have the same issue as Think Buddha, the review bar indicates I add 40-50 characters/day, and I've been doing that for 5 days, but really I think only 5-10 characters are added.

I've just uploaded a potential fix that might do some good for the Genius problems we're seeing. Keep reporting what happens. Thanks for all your help in debugging this, guys.

The added bar is also counting words that you add, and tones, so if you add a word whose characters you already know, like 老外, you'll still get one item for 老外's writing and one for its tones, even though you're not adding anything for 老 or 外.

It doesn't strictly add new words when you clear all those that are ready, now, because it's probably going to be more efficient to overpractice a little bit. This way, you get those items that are close to due, but would probably be overdue by the next time you practice. You also mix up review and adding new characters a bit, which I think is good. What do you guys think? You can change how early it adds new words with the adding frequency option on the vocab options page.

出 has a high review time because you keep seeing it in other words, and so it gets a little bit of a boost each time. Do you think you'd forget it if you didn't study any Chinese for two years?

I like the mixing of review and add.

What happens if I get 出 wrong once, perhaps click it wrong by mistake, or confuse it with another chu sounding character in a word? Does it get reset to 0?

I don't think I'd forget it, just surprised at Skritter's confidence in me.

It's a good question from ximeng. I have the same issue with occasionally getting a character wrong as part of a word.

Take a simple character like 一. Skritter could probably set the review time for 一 to ten years for most of us (if you're getting this one wrong, folks, it's time to find an easier language to study :-)

But I'll still occasionally get this wrong as part of a word like 一定 (for some reason, I want to write this is as 以定). So if I write 以 instead of 一 for 一定, what does Skritter now think about my knowledge of 一 (as an individual character)? Does it get reset to zero because I got it wrong, or does it just get dropped a little bit, because I've gotten it right in so many other contexts? Or does it not get changed at all, because I got it wrong in the context of a word, rather than as a single character?

The kitten used to just set wrong item intervals back down to the starting interval. Now, it cuts the interval to 20-30% of what it was (although this factor adapts to your performance, too).

Currently, Skritter does mark you as wrong for 一 in 一定. You won't really see it expressed, because 一's interval is going to be higher than 一定's, and so you'll see 一定 instead.

It's part of the plan to change that so that you can get the character wrong in the word but not wrong for itself. That'll happen soonish, when I implement the right/wrong indicators/toggles on each part of the prompt interface and a few other things. Until then, it is technically broken, but I wouldn't worry about it.

Oh, yeah, I forgot to mention: I just uploaded a potential Genius fix for some of the problems expressed here. Please, let me know if this helps anything.

Seems to be working far better, Nick. Thanks.

wow. great discussion. great to realize I wasn't just imagining some weird Skritter behavior in my head. great answers to a few questions I myself had about how the kitten works with the character/word thing (mostly because it seems to do it quite well, I think... testing the word again more often than just giving you the character you got wrong by itself).

Thanks all around.

My review pile isn't going down. It gets to around 30 or so then hovers around there. Maybe because of this, I'm getting hardly any new words added either. I've tried refreshing the page, but to no avail...

Sorry to report that it's started sticking again. Currently stuck around 60. But I am getting new words added.

Update since this morning - I've got the review pile down to zero, though the number of items in the pile seems to go down a lot slower than the number of reviews that I actually do.

I'm getting new words added, but not at as high a rate as I was used to.

Well, shuckz. For whatever reason, it's giving you items that aren't quite due yet (so aren't counted in your review bar) before those that are in the bar. And if refreshing the page doesn't change that, the cause must be something different than I've thought.

I'll try to solve it again, but probably not right away, as there's lots to do. You're not really losing much efficiency when this happens, and the adding rate should hopefully be independent of this bug.

I'm still working on the adding rates. I just upped the rate for "Pretty frequently" and "Early and often", if you want to try playing with those.

不好意思。How long have the different adding rates been there? I've just upped my rate to the second highest level and things seem to be working better. Thanks!

Only since we put the Genius up. All this stuff is definitely going in the User's Guide, but until then the 不好意思s are all ours.

I'm having the stuck problem. As I practice the review queue goes down, but as soon as I leave the practice page it goes right back up (currently up to 664). This number has been fairly persistent for the past few days, going up perhaps, but refusing to go down.

I don't want to exaggerate. The queue has moved down over the past days, but never very far. Just now I managed to get it down to 659 on the main page (after doing about 20-30 items). In any case, it's still not moving much.

A bug that I can actually find! There should actually be 875 items due for you, zhouyi, but the home/practice pages are capping out around 666, because it only counts up to 166 items of each type (where types are simp, trad, or both for rune and tone) in your case. Because there are very few tones that aren't the same for both simp and trad, that comes to a max of about 666 items instead of the intended 1000. For someone studying one style or the other, it would max out at 750.

I'll confer with Scott about how we can fix it. Until then, you can practice and make progress, it just won't show up for another couple hundred items. I hope Scott's tweaks 'n suggestions help with the vast tides of easy ones. Using Save Me with a long time period would definitely be good in this case, since most of the items aren't going to be forgotten no matter how long you push them back, and you can get ahead faster.