Hi!

Skritter is great, but I kind of feel that it isn't as customizable or flexible that it could, and probably should be.

For example, a way to select several lists to study, and not just all or one.

Another, imho very important option would be to be able to chose to study just single characters (from all of your lists and "my words"), or words (or both).

I dont have much time to use skritter at the moment, and Í am most worried about forgetting the characters. Obviously, if you spend 30 min studying just single characters, you will review a much greater variety of different characters, than if you would review words.

To my knowledge, the only way to do this atm would be to create a new list and fill that list with single characters, then study only that list, which is a very bad way to do it, since: 1. It will take a lot of time 2. I cant remember all the single characters in my words, and more than a few would be left out. 3. The list cant be shared since you would want to keep it constantly updated.

I'm not all that good with computers, but would adding a "study all my characters" option next to "study all my words" really take that much time? It seems like a really simple thing that would make a huge difference.

Thanks!

The answer to "would X really take that much time?" is almost always, "No--it would take even more." The reason that you can't study from a subset of multiple lists is the same reason you can't study just character or just words, which is this: it would require a ton of crazy indexing code in order for Skritter to be able to grab your due reviews in that way. Characters vs. words could be done with only a medium amount of bloodsweat, but multiple, specific lists turns out to be a nightmare.

Making Skritter more customizable in ways like this has, so far, made it so that we have to support more configurations and can develop new features (like better definition practice) more slowly. Ideally, we should have even less customization and flexibility, because we'd have a lot more time to put toward improving the basics that everyone can use.

As far as studying just characters for review: you can export them all, get rid of the multiple-character words using Excel (either with custom sorting, or just by hand), and then dump that into a list, but that's about it. You're right that it's not a great solution.

If you are worried about keeping up with reviews, I would recommend to just do what you can and not sweat it. Even if you don't quite keep up, as long as you keep studying a little bit, and can come back to it with more time eventually, the scheduling will see to it that you remember everything (just not as efficiently as if you cleared reviews every day). There's an interesting efficiency tradeoff between studying things on time and remembering them more, vs. studying them late and remembering them less, but having stronger memories on the ones you do remember (and thus having to study them less times overall). You can take advantage of this tradeoff to some extent to practice late and not lose too much ground.

@DaXia you could export your words, filter them to get the subset you want, then paste that into a custom list.

Thanks for the answers!

I'm not very good with excel, and it would be great if you could give me a few pointers as how to do this filtering thing.

@Nick
I didn't relize that it was so complicated. However, the multiple list thing is not really that important, but the studying only characters thing might be something worth looking into for you guys.

It's hard not to get a little bit stressed up when your up for review words start piling up ^^

@DaXia if you want to do it with Excel, you can add a column defined as

=LEN(C1)

where C1 is the cell that contains your words/characters. Then you can paste that formula and fill in the whole column with those lengths. Finally, you can filter or sort the worksheet by the length.

James