I recently added a bunch of new words and studied their writings and pinyin before I got the definition prompts. Now I'm running into the definition prompts and am getting them right with a high frequency, even though they're "new words". I would rather not have them scheduled way out into the future, so to be safe I'm marking them all as wrong, even if I know them.

Part of the problem here is that I'm just not sure what marking them correct would do to the scheduling. That brings me to a nice feature Anki has, which maybe the Skritter guys could consider adding: when it asks you to grade your response, it presents something like

1 - Again
2 - Hard (4 hours)
3 - Good (1 day)
4 - Easy (5 days)

This quickly shows you when the item will be scheduled if you select each of the options.

I would imagine that the scheduling could be displayed in small text on the grading buttons, or as mouseover text if the text would be too obtrusive.

James

I hesitate to add the upcoming scheduling on the grading buttons, because I think it'll cause people to overthink things and take longer to grade themselves, when really it's better to grade as quickly as possible and trust the scheduling in most cases.

That's the main reason for avoiding this feature. If it was worthwhile, then we'd want to make sure that fetching the scheduling information didn't slow things down, and we'd want to make sure that everyone was cool with it so we didn't need another option. Mainly, I'm just worried about people spending too much time grading (and then also asking tons of questions about why such-and-such is scheduled like that).

Perhaps this is enough information for you?

http://www.skritter.com/faq#scheduling

The default intervals for new items are:
1: 10 minutes
2: 1.4 days
3: 1 week
4: 4 weeks

And this is affected by Skritter's adaptation to your learning skills as described in that FAQ entry.

Right, but it's the personal adaptation part that I'm not clear on. Maybe if I could see somehow what my particular numbers are for new items?

If you mark them right, they should be around:
Writing: 16 days
Tone: 13 days
Reading: 13 days
Definition: 5 days

Divide by 5 to see what you'd get with a grade of 2, or multiply by 4 to see what you'd get with a grade of 4.

If you mark them wrong:
Writing: 30 seconds
Tone: 2 hours
Reading: 3 minutes
Definition: 46 minutes

Exactly! Thanks for the numbers.

So, if I mark a new definition right, it won't come up again for five days, which is kind of a long time considering I only just learned it. That's why I need to game the system and mark all new items wrong.

James

Right, assuming you want to start studying the definition right away. I find it helpful to work on the other parts for a while before doing anything with the (often-frustrating) definitions.

How long are you seeing the definitions after doing the writings and pinyins? There is some spacing built in to push those back, but perhaps it's insufficient in this case?

Hmmmm, I think it's a day or so.

James

If you are remembering them after a day after not even having studied them directly, then you should be able to remember them after longer than a day the next time--doesn't make sense to give a 1. At least a 2. A 3 sounds better to me.