In my words, I see this:

You're automatically adding words from these vocab lists to My Words while studying.
You are not adding any words from any vocab lists.

Why aren't I adding any words? If I make lists, are they automatically adding to what I get to study? If not, how do I make sure all my self-created lists get studied?

I'm confused...

On the list's page, click the big green "Study List" button in the upper left. That will add it to My Lists, and then words will be added to My Words from it as you study. It doen't automatically start studying a list when you create it.

I'd like to know how to know how to add words for studying as well. I have several questions more or less about that that I'll dump here:

1. Right now my queue is empty. There are a whole lot of words that skritter has tested me on for reading/tone/definition, but not for writing. I need to learn the writing of these words for class, so I want to be able to somehow force learning the writing. From what it seems to me, it's been like this for about a week. In the meantime only about 10 or 15 words a day are "due", and it's sometimes a day or two between practicing certain characters I've completely forgotten. I know it may be best to let the skritter algorithm run it's course and that I should only be introduced to new characters once I've learned the older ones, but there are few characters I'm really forgetting and sometimes, because of class deadlines, I need to have skritter test me on other words for it to be a useful study tool. One thing I've done is study only those words (the one skritter hasn't tested my writing for) in a "list" and then it asks about writing when I'm studying the list and also when I study all. But I'm wondering if there's a simpler way.

2. Another question about the lists. I can add words to my generic "words" list (from the queue I guess?), and then create a list with a subset of those words to, say, study for a quiz. I don't "study custom list" because I've already got all the words in my big list. But then a character that isn't due in my big list is due when I study the small list. I thought it was all integrated, so this is confusing.

4. Skritter really baffles me sometimes. It'll tell me something is "due" (say, 94%) when I was tested 2 days ago and it says "scheduled for 3 months". I can't tell whether it's a bug or whether I really do need to be studying it.


Thanks for the help! I'm new to skritter and still learning my way around, so sorry if some of these questions are obvious. I really appreciate all the time you spend answering my numerous inquiries :)

Hmm, I'm not sure which words you haven't gotten the writing prompts for--can you give some examples? You should be seeing all parts for those words. If you need to cram some characters, you can do as you did and make a list for it, or you can go to the sections in the original list and cram each of those by viewing each section's contents and clicking "Study Section" at the bottom. You can also dump characters you know you'll need in a test into the scratchpad, if you just want a sort of temporary list.

The scheduling is different when you study small lists and single sections. It has less emphasis on spaced repetition and more emphasis on cramming every word so that you'll see them all. So items that aren't due yet in normal practice can still come up when practicing a smaller set of words.

The "scheduled for 3 months" may refer to a different part of the same word, for example tone vs. writing. Or, if there recently occurred some connection issues, you might have hit the bug where you see the word again soon after practicing it, and then the readiness statistic gets funky. But I'd guess it's the first one. The "due (94%)" line just picks one of the parts in the word you're getting prompted for, whereas the word popup has a line for each of the parts.

Hope this helps, and let me know if I'm not making sense.

Thanks for the clarifications! As to which words I haven't gotten writing prompts for, I've already "forced" most of them to be prompted in the way I've described above, namely, to "cram" the words that aren't showing up—after they've showed up in cram mode, they show up in study all mode. Now, though, what's left are all my added words in the textbook Integrated Chinese 1 (3rd Edition): Lesson 6. Making Appointments (Dialogue 2). There you'll see a group of words that have been tested for pinyin and definition, but are completely white for writing and tone. Thanks again! Your answers made perfect sense :)

Are you changing which parts you have activated for study on and off? I don't know why else you would have gotten definition/reading added and not writing/tone. Currently when you add from a list and you've disabled some parts, it won't add those parts, so when you go back to the list with those parts enabled you have to add through it again to get the missing ones. Could that be it?

Thanks for the response to my initial question. I may well be that I am stupid, but I think that could have been clearer. For example, "Study List" is technically ambiguous between a noun phrase (as in 'a study list') and a verb phrase (as in 'study this list'). So putting it on a big green button doesn't necessarily clarify. Just trying to help.

I too have a question on adding words. I have set the rate of new additions to Normal. But I feel that words are added very very seldom. For example, I have been practicing for about three hours during the last three days, and only a couple of new words have been added during that time period. If I try to add words manually by clicking the green cross, the green bar grows, but the words are not added, they just stay there. Right now I have 8 items to review and 19 added, but I mostly get reviews.

What happens to the added words indicated by the green bar? Are they placed in some imaginary queue? But if there are 0 words to review, shouldn´t the added words appear in study?

I agree with Tove - I'm finding the same issue in that I'm not covering any new words (even though it says that they're added in the green bar), I have nothing left to review in the review bar, but still all I'm getting is review. I know it's important to review..but I'm getting a little bored with the same 100 words. I'm pulling my list from ChinesePod and I have over 2000 words there - so I was wondering if there is a limit to the list size? All my words are in two lists. And also, Skritter keeps putting my lists into the "review only" section, so I have to keep pulling it back into the "add new words" section.

Ok - I think I figured out what the problem is for me. It seems that the issue is that the program only imported 98 of the words for one of my lists from ChinesePod. Are there limits to the size of the lists? In this list I have >2200 words. It's quite huge. I have this list broken down into smaller lists, but with the way the we have to import them, it will take me a very, very long time to do this.

Also, I can't seem to change my avatar. As much as I like to be a disco-dancing cactuar...

My problem is not the same, because I am studying a couple of lists with many unstudied words in them. Since I wrote the post above a couple of new words have been added. Still, I would like to know when "green bar" words actually come up for study.

I would also like to propose that when words/items are added manually, these items should come up for study immediately. Wouldn´t that be logical?

@Tove: The new words should show up within the next two or three reviews as soon as you press the green button. In order to be timely, the program loads a few words ahead so that when you move forward, there's no delay, so the new words don't show up immediately. They show up a few words later so that the program has time to load all the resources in the background.

Also, it should add words automatically when you run out of words that are due. Have you tried changing the settings so that the words get added earlier, on the study settings page in the account tab?

@cinnamonfern: Yes, I checked and the ChinesePod label lists are limited to 100 (there are probably two words on the 100 that were grabbed that we don't have in our system, I'm guessing). I'm going to be reworking that logic soon to use their new API, so I'm going to see about removing that restriction.

What browser are you using? It looks like you changed your avatar to one of our defaults, but were you trying to upload your own avatar?

@Scott: I got around the 100 word limit by uploading my individual lists. (I make one for each lesson). I guess this is better anyway because it gives me time to go over my old words first.

I'm using Firefox. I changed to a different default avatar, and this shows up when I look at my CPod vocabulary list details (Made by cinnamonfern), but it doesn't show up in the forum or in the Skritter home page. It's not a big deal, just seems like a bug.

@Scott: You are saying that the new words should show up within the next two or three reviews. That is what did not happen, they just sat there "in the green bar" during twenty - fifty reviews, or longer until I finished the session.

Could it be a problem that I had the retention to 95%? I have just changed it down to 92. Would this have any influence on the manually added items though?

Actually, during the last few days, more items have been added (which can be clearly seen in the progress charts). Would this have happened because I have reviewed more items that were not actually due yet, which would induce more automatic adding?

@cinnamonfern: That's good that you've got a workaround. Still, will try to make it so that later on you won't have to do that!

Also, I'm seeing the underwater stingray avatar for you, that's the one you chose right? I'm seeing it everywhere it should be. Perhaps there's a caching problem there, try hitting Ctrl-F5 to refresh, see if that fixes your avatar.

@Tove: I don't think moving the retention rate will have much of a difference. That just changes when items are scheduled in the future, and they'll be scheduled farther off as the system will have a lower success rate to target. Try instead changing the add frequency setting to Fast, that will change how early items get added.

Reviewing items early may trigger more items to be added, yes, given your add frequency setting. But either way, if you manually add a word it should show up soon.

By the way Tove, do you usually study everything or do you tend to study lists individually? Perhaps there's a difference there.

I almost always study everything.

Anyway, items have started to add again, probably because of reviewing more early than before, so there´s no problem there. It would be interesting though to know what the different add frequencies mean in practice. If I understand correctly, "normal" would mean that items start to add when items around 100% ready are coming up for review. But how fast? And "how fast" are the other frequencies?

Regarding the manual add, I will make some more systematic observations. Maybe I was just confused.

@Scott - Ctrl+F5 did the trick. Thanks! :)