Hi all,

Here are the results from the recent Twitter competition, which ended at 11:59 PM Friday. Please check my numbers and make sure they're correct.

byzanti:
chars 34
reviews 8563
minutes 649

christophomos:
chars 90
reviews 5702
minutes 793

jww1066:
chars 62
reviews 10770
minutes 538

joschua011: not enough data - there were only two Skritter tweets during the competition period. What happened?

gregshap:
chars 81
reviews 1721
minutes 171

So the winner of the "characters learned" title is christophomos, with gregshap as the runner-up. Congratulations!

It looks like I won the "number of reviews" title, with byzanti as the runner-up.

Some interesting numbers:
gregshap has by far the lowest "reviews per character learned" ratio, 21.2. christophomos is a distant second with 63.4, I have 173.7, and byzanti has 251.9.

The time values are highly suspect due to the way Skritter measures study time. However, it appears that gregshap has a much higher "characters learned per hour" than anybody else, at 28.4. In a distant second and third place are myself and christophomos at 6.9 and 6.8 characters learned per hour, respectively.

James

Thanks for collating all this!

"It looks like I won the "number of reviews" title, with byzanti as the runner-up. "

Not the grandest of titles! I'm still working on getting mine down to more manageable levels.

Congrats to the winner(s)! :)

Good game all around!

Congratulations Chris and everyone else, and thanks jww1066 for initiating the contest!

The contest definitely pushed me to focus more and study longer than usual (even though you all completely eclipsed my study time).

Lets do it again soon!

@gregshap I'm curious as to why your numbers make you look so much more efficient than the rest of us. Your reviews per character learned and your time per character learned are both much, much better than any of the rest of us. What are you doing when you study? What was your Chinese level when you started?

James

Not being a participant, so speaking from a position of ignorance, I have to wonder if that is because he might not have as much of a backlog of items to go through? I could pretty easily do a ton of reveiws and time without adding a single character just trying to keep up with items as they come up.

Unless time spent on new characters vs time spent on reviewing is somehow separated?

I do usually average about 30 words per hour of study, as long as I study at least once per day and I keep on schedule. The main reason probably being that I've studied Chinese on my own for a couple years, and spent about a year in China prior to using Skritter, so I do have some familiarity with a lot of the characters I'm learning.

When I started getting serious about skritter this january, I could probably only handwrite 100-200 characters perfectly, but I could read maybe 600-1200(wild guess) depending on context. Right now I'm just under 1300 on skritter, so most new words are at list somewhat familiar looking.


Some other thoughts though:


I spend a lot of time thinking about pneumonics for new characters. Especially the traditional ones. Not sure how often I go over the 30 second mark with that, but I think that it really pays off.

In general, when i'm skrittering I stay pretty focused. During the competition I did most of my studying in the morning, when I'm sharpest, with another review later in the day to lock down the new words. I think if I was watching tv or doing something else at the same time I would be a lot less productive.

There was another forum thread about the 'add individual characters from word' option. I love it, and I think it lets the SRS do its job a lot better. (and since I don't study definitions, I don't care if the individual character definitions are obscure).

I got a big efficiency jump when I switched to Wacom also, but I assume most of you are already tablet users.

As far as a backlog, I didn't do any over-reviewing beforehand, but I don't study readings or definition in Skritter, so I might have less to review for that reason.

What do you guys do to try to up your efficiency?

@greg that all makes sense. I thought you must have had some exposure to Chinese before you started.

I personally am actually not particularly interested in efficiency per se; I started studying Chinese from absolute zero a couple of years ago and so my focus is on perfecting the basics rather than on adding lots of new characters. I study both simplified and traditional, including definitions and readings; I also add lots and lots of words and phrases that use the same characters, to learn the nuances of meaning which are hard to learn from individual characters' definitions. So my "characters learned" numbers are probably always going to be fairly low compared to the amount of time I spend.