Hi, I started the trial period yesterday and have spent a few hours trying to figure how to use Skritter. Probably it's just me but I'm having difficulties using it. Is there a user manual?

1. I selected Integrated Chinese as list 1. Skritter keeps showing up same words again and again. How do I select specific words which I wish to learn write?

2. I selected a lesson from Chinesepod to include in my list. However, these words did not show up. The Integrated Chinese words kept showing up.

3. I selected radicals 1-30 in my list. Occasionally these radicals do appear, seemingly at random with words from Integrated Chinese.

4. I created a custom list "Restaurant", however when I add valid chinese characters to the list, Skritter went red (not valid). Finally, after trying this and that I managed to get one character in.

5. I deleted the Chinesepod list and watched the bar indicator showing the deletion being processed. However, the Chinesepod lesson still appears in the active lists.

So here's what I'd like to do now:

Delete all the lists and start all over again. How do I delete all the lists permanently? Please provide the step by step instructions.

After all lists have been deleted, I want to create my own list of words for learning to write. Please provide the step by step instructions.

What is the difference between practice and cramming?

I added words to the scratch pad. However, it seems the deletion function does not work. Clicking the trash can icon does not delete a selected word. In other words, words can be added on the scratch pad but cannot be deleted.

Here's how the vocabulary system works:

Skritter uses a spaced repetition algorithm to ensure that words you study will never be forgotten. The system is designed to prompt you repeatedly for the same item at longer and longer intervals to ensure that you actually keep that character in your memory. This means that Skritter adds vocabulary slowly as you practice, because if you're going to learn something forever it's going to take a while and you don't want to be overwhelmed.

If you don't know a prompt, you'll see it more frequently until you do. If you do know a word it, you'll start seeing it less frequently to make time to learn new material. You can tell when Skritter thinks you don't know a prompt by the color of the glow. Red means you don't know it, green means you do.

If you want to remove characters, words, sections or entire lists simply go to the vocabulary list page, select the offending list from the box entitled "Your Active Lists." On the page that comes up, select the delete tab and do your worst. The delete function will get rid of all the character, word, and tones in the section or list you choose to do away with.

So to answer your questions specifically:

1) By starting to study Integrated Chinese, you added those items and Skritter is going to keep drilling you until you know them. If you don't want to learn them you have several options.

You can reset your account (delete everything ever) by going to the vocabulary options page, going to the "Delete All" tab and clicking the "Nuke it" button.

You can go the vocabulary page and delete specific characters, words, sections, or lists.

Finally, you can take a more organic approach, and simply click the "next" button each time you see something you don't want to learn. Skritter interprets skipping characters as an indication you know it. You'll have to do this many times to never see it again, but it's relatively quick.

2) You should have seen the items from the ChinesePod list, which makes me think this might be a bug. Is the list showing up on the vocabulary viewer on the practice page and in the "Your Active Lists" box on the vocabulary lists page?

3) This is also a part of how the system is designed to work. If you have more than one list active, Skritter will mix the items so that you are learning all the material concurrently.

4) If you are creating a list and you continue to get red boxes, those mean that the character parser can't recognize your input. Generally this could be caused by not delimiting the characters (not putting in spaces, returns, underscores, whatever), inputting a string that is too long (entering definitions along side the hanzi might cause this). Could you provide an example of input you tried that was rejected? If we knew exactly what was causing problems we could make the parser more robust.

5) When you deleted the ChinesePod list, you did in fact delete all of its contents, but we had a quirk with the list deleter where it didn't disable adding from the list. We'll be changing it shortly. The long and short of the matter is that it did in fact delete the requested content, it just didn't make it clear that it had done so.

To figure out the list creation problem, I'd need some more information about what exactly you were entering, feel free to drop me a personal email with that information, and hopefully we can make it work for you pretty quickly.

Practicing and Cramming are different in two critical ways: practicing uses the spaced repetition, cramming doesn't. While you're cramming you can control the words you study exactly, when practicing you are optimizing your learning by letting Skritter pick what should be studied next. Cramming is ultimately more productive for preparing for a small quiz or character test. Practicing is intended to build your overall character power level in the long term.

To delete words on the scratchpad you can't simply press the delete button you actually have to drag and drop the item into the Trash icon. I hadn't thought that functionality was counter intuitive, but thinking about it I guess that doesn't make too much sense. I'll think about that a little more and see what can be done.

Thanks for sticking it out and trying Skritter. Sorry there have been so many design flaws. If you're interested, we're actually redesigning the vocabulary pages and are always looking for feedback, and we're especially interested in newbie opinions, so if you have the inclination, let me know and I can send the new screen caps to you for review. Hopefully we can improve the system substantially for new members.

Hmm, I wasn't aware that the --> (next) button indicated knowledge (I had thought it just skipped and didn't alter the stats).

I find that cram mode is not too bad a balance between running through all the characters and concentrating on the ones you need to learn - part of me wants it to just be Skritter with a temporarily reduced character universe; if (when) I'm studying for a test I want to concentrate on what I don't know until I know every word in my list (and then review the list a few times) - running through the words I do know multiple times is not how I 'cram' for test offline nor is it really how I want to cram using skritter. It is a hard balance though.

Doing cram (or scratchpad), it does show you the ones you got wrong repeatedly until you get everything right once, at which point it resets. The state of what you got right and wrong doesn't persist past page reload or "shuffle", though.