Ok, so I have been studying tones and writing, but now I want to add definition practice to all the words I have studied so far (and all words I haven't studied yet of course). Now, there were 2 weird options when I chose to add definitions to the mix, and I really didn't understand them.
I only want to add one more part to study, but not reset everything.
I took the reset option, but nothing happened. I'm still only studying writing and tones, and I haven't got 1 question about the definitions in 80 mins of practice.
Did I do something wrong?

I think there is an bug there. I did the same ( for reading) one week ago and reset all my lists as well. I still haven't received one single "Reading". I have added new words and I have restarted my lists but nothing comes. I have now switched back while waiting for a solution. A funny thing is that when i did change back, the settings page did not reflect the settings I thought I had. It did however anyway say that just those settings where changed once i saved it. Strange.

It's a dense piece of text and it's tough to communicate the idea, but it's important to understand the difference. Basically, Skritter manages the parts you study individually, and so it can't add the definitions all at once, or you'd be inundated with many new items. The proper way to add definitions to your studies is gradually, the same way you added tones and writings before. But, going back and getting all the definitions for the words you added previously necessitates stopping adding completely new words and instead exclusively adding definitions for words you've studied before until you're completely caught up.

So the two options are:

Don't reset a list: meaning you just keep on adding words from where you already are and don't bother adding the definitions for the words you've already added. Your studies are not interrupted, but unless you manually change the list settings yourself, you won't be studying the definitions for your old words.

Reset a list: meaning you go back to the beginning to add all those definitions. This gets you the definitions for everything, but it interrupts your studies; depending on how far along you were on the given list, it's going to take a while to get back to where you were before the addition of definitions.

So that's why we provide the choice: do you want to study definitions for everything, or continue adding from your current location? Depending on your situation, you'll want to choose one or the other. For example, if you're a student, and you need to keep up with class, you may not have time to reset a list and add all the definitions for the words you've already studied.

And just to be clear, you won't see any difference until you start adding more words. When you start adding, you should be pretty much just adding definitions for a while, if you choose to reset your lists. But either you need to finish your review queue or you need to manually add from lists in order to start seeing definition prompts.

If that makes more sense now, could you describe in your own words how it works? Maybe then we can tweak the text to make more sense.

And yes, Mandarinboy, there was a bug here! It wasn't resetting some lists. I've fixed it I believe, though I didn't want to test it on your accounts in case either of you changed your minds. If you choose to reset the lists and you go to the study page where it lists the lists you are studying, and they aren't reset to the beginning, let me know and I'll investigate it further until it resets properly. DaXia, if you want to reset the lists, then remove definitions from your studies, save the settings, then add them back again to get the reset dialog once more.

Hope that helps!

Hi Scott

I did like you said, but it's still no working :/
I reseted the list called "Old list" or something like that (it was the only one to chose from), and I have been skrittering for about 10 min now, and haven't had 1 definition question yet.

Couple more fixes I had to make. Tested it on your account and now was finally able to reset all your lists. Sorry that took a couple rounds of testing!

Now, the only thing left to do is add words. You've got a few hundred reviews due right now, and you won't have definitions added until you finish that backlog (again, don't want to overwhelm you so words by default are added when you've tamed the words you've already added). Or to get studying definitions faster, you can manually start adding them by pressing the green + button in the upper left corner while you study.

Also, if you want to start adding definitions from the lists you had finished, you'll need to click 'restart adding' for them here:

http://www.skritter.com/study