This topic is related to some others, but a somewhat different question that I'd love to get others' views on. Are any of you getting bogged down?

What I mean is, are you continuing to see good progress? In my skritter practice a few things happened about the same time:
1) I reached 1400 characters and 1400 words, now 1500 characters and 1900 words - meaning that the number of new words is growing lots faster than the number of new characters now.
2) the new definition practice, very good!, I do this
3) the new hidden pinyin practice, also good and I do that

What I see now is piles of things to review each day but little added to my new characters. I used to reach my 5 characters a day goal fairly often, now not at all. I've even seen that line dip down :( And this is with an hour of skritter a day, on average - I mean an hour by the skritter clock not the clock on the wall.

I think this is all good practice and I am grateful for this skritter tool that has made my practice more efficient. I am wondering, especially from you giants that have far exceeded these counts, if/when/what kind of progress you saw after such a plateau or maybe the question is - How did you ever reach 2000, 3000 characters?

thanks

Well, I've just been adding characters, and am going to start on words soon. So I'm in no position to say.

But with regards to the graph, it would be nice for one also based on words. Still, they've said a rehaul of the progress page will happen at some point. Hope so, as my graph's going to miserable from now on p.

I have been working with only characters as well, and am currently on a plateau as well.

I tend to study by first setting my preferences to add characters Early and Often. Then I practice until the number of characters to be reviewed reaches 800+, at which point I change my preferences to add characters Rarely.
I then continue practicing until I get the number of reviews down to zero (which can take a week or more), and then I repeat the process.

As for rate of progress after a plateau, it has been about a month between my last plateau and my current one, and in that time, I have added around 1500 characters bringing my total to just over 3100 characters, studying between two and four hours a day Skritter time (one of the advantages to being unemployed)

If you want to focus on learning more characters, maybe you should try different vocabulary lists. Some of the lists are more focused on words (like the textbooks), others more on characters (like the radicals list).

Reaching a plateau and then suddenly -after a lot of hard work- finding yourself reaching new heights is all part of the learning process. Don't forget that Skritter is just a resource to help you with learning things by heart. It can not be IMO a replacement for context. If you really want to learn Chinese, or any language for that matter, context is the key thing. This means reading texts in the first place. Then later watching movies, series, etc.

I go to youtube and watch Chinese karaoke music videos among other videos and there is other videos like that.:)

Maybe you should try some different ways to study?

Skritter is absolutely brilliant for learning to write characters, but I strongly suspect it is not the most efficient way to learn compound words. After all, you spend a lot of the time forming the character shapes. If you study a compound word that you already know all the characters in, then that time is mostly wasted. Granted, you do need to know which of the many homonyms is actually being used, and the new definition practice is more suitable for compounds.

I suggest you take Christians's advice about switching to a character-based list on Skritter, and at the same time cut down your hours and use them for other methods, either listening or reading.

By the way, I'm only on 550 words, so what do I know? The only reason I think I know anything useful is because I had learned a lot of spoken vocab and very little written when I started Skritter, and I progressed very quickly to begin with. I find it is a great deal easier to learn to write a character when I don't have to worry about the tone and the meaning at the same time.

Rachael.

Another thing: have you tried experimenting with the "add words manually" button?
Rachael.

Add words manually actually will likely cause one to be more bogged down and behind in reviews... it adds words earlier than you should and therefore will slow down the current session and snowball into the next sessions/days/etc.

Of course, if adding 2 or 3 words every day inspires you to practice 30 minutes more despite having a large review queue, than I would say adding a word manually is worth it... (likewise if you know you will get your review queue down each day but prefer to add a couple words earlier in the process)

Thanks to all. Right, one could draw from different lists and get more characters than words. I suppose I misled you all (and myself) by focusing on the character count. While it's nice to see that graph climb, I do not think that would be helpful for achieving actual proficiency. Just look at the HSK expectations:

basic: 800 characters/1000 words => .8 ratio
elementary: 1600/3000 => .5
intermediate: 2200/5200 => .4
advanced: 2800/8800 => .3


Back at my 1400 characters/1400 (1.0 ratio) words I was way behind according to the ratios above. Now at 1500/2000 (.75) I am closer to the HSK standards. So I guess I need to keep slogging away at it.

And along the way, keep using other methods. Reading (right, marchey).. byzanti and mykal (both learning characters), are you finding things you can read/watch? Just curious. We've tried movies and videos but it is a painfully slow process: watch two minutes to get the gist of it, rewind, listen and watch subtitles, rewind, look at those subtitles again and decode, rewind and listen again. Ah! That's what they're saying! The sitcoms aren't so funny at this pace.

re: reading/watching stuff

I much prefer the method of just watching it...

I have been going through the show Black and White (痞子英雄), now at episode 15 out of 24(?) (heating up, btw) and the subtitles are blurry and the audio is kinda crappy (wish at least one of those wasn't true), but it has been fun. It is a police detective show with obligatory comedy and romance, sure I don't get some of the dialogue and probably laugh/cry less than if I understood all of it, but by watching it I can get the main plot and ENJOY it, which is the key to continuing watching and getting the benefits therein. Each episode is one hour and I have been watching it off and on for a couple months, and it is cool to get a lot more words and sentences now compared to when I started....

1557 characters, 1526 words, btw (and also in a bit of a slowdown period)

sarac: I am reading primary school material. great stuff. If you are in China just walk into any bookstore and you will find everything you need. A lot of traditional stories amongst this material, this is feeding me more 'literary' vocab and as my ultimate goal is to be able to read literature, this is just fine. As for movies and series, I use a double approach. Sometimes I just watch a series for the content, being happy with being able to follow the story. With a series, this may mean I have to watch the first episodes a few times to be able to catch on. But after that it is usually easier. The second approach is to try to understand almost everything. Chinese subtitles are a great help in this respect. I use Xine ( linux program) which allows me to take screenshots with a simple mouse click. (I am sure other programs can do the same). As I go through a scene I click whenever a new subtitle pops up. Afterward I can go through these captured image and take whatever time I need to understand the dialogues. Then I watch again and can follow the dialogue in real time.

I'm a big believer in the do a lot of a little - i.e. a bit of listening, speaking, reading, writing (both Skrittering and sentence composition online and offline), grammar exercises and whatever else you can come up with and do a bit of it each day so you regularly get a variety of practice and make connections.

It seems I've added a little over one character for every character (about 1100 characters and 1000 words) and as yet have learned about 80% of them (I added all the characters from my course and am using spring festival break to catch up).

For TV shows I just watch them through and if I miss some I miss some. The key is to watch them again later and pick up a bit more. For comic books I re-read later on. Not as interesting the second time but I do read it faster.

"And along the way, keep using other methods. Reading (right, marchey).. byzanti and mykal (both learning characters), are you finding things you can read/watch? Just curious."

After a try of listening to native level radio etc, I figured it would be best to stick to material aimed at my level. I feel it's more productive than through osmosis or painstaking decryption of a text.

Once in a while I do have a listen or a read of such things, but only as a gauge.

@sarac

I tend to watch a lot of Chinese television, mostly Hunan TV (湖南卫视), as well as listening to/watching the Chinese version of Disney's Mulan. That being said, I don't understand the majority of what is being said, but I will often catch a word here and there, and sometimes I'll understand a phrase.

I am new to Skritter, but I guess the system is similar to Smart.fm in that it uses staged repetition that is gradually extended. Eventually then, you are going to push through repetition and get back on to adding new stuff. But yeah, it takes time.

After studying Japanese at varying levels of intensity I've found its only when I can spend 1-3 hours a day, pretty much every day, that I really make any progress. And that is with a combination of listening, speaking, reading, writing. Yeah, its all about connections. Thankfully the intenet is making it so much easier to study outside of a classroom!