Hello everyone,

I've recently reached '5000 words learnt' using Skritter for the past couple of years.

I spend exactly an hour a day (according to Skritter's session timer) reviewing words, and I manually add extra words if and when necessary. So far I have been astonished by how wonderful this application is. (I use an iPad.)

However, my reviews are becoming particularly burdensome and I am especially annoyed by "leech" words (i.e. words I spend a disproportionate time studying, which somehow I repeatedly forget.) I notice that Skritter says I have studied some words for more than 20 minutes each.

Is there anyway to generate a list of words in descending order according to the amount of time a user has spent skrittering?

I would like to spend some extra study time, independent of Skritter, to focus on these words and try to break the "leech cycle".

Additional information, for example who many times an individual word has been reviewed, with figures for correct answers and incorrect answers, would also be of interest to me; more so, in fact, than the "time spent" figure.

This could be a great function on the Words part of the website. http://www.skritter.com/vocab/mywords

Many thanks.

There was a discussion about doing this, and I think Skritter had leech detection on the beta a while back, but I'm not sure what happened to it. There are one or two forum posts but nothing recent. Anybody know where it went?

Hi James, first of all congrats on your progress! I thought I was doing well with HSK3! Lol.

My advice would be to use the scratchpad for the characters you find harder. Maybe you can do your normal reviews and when a tricky one comes up, you can star it. Then you can just study favourites.

The thing with scratchpad is that it wont count towards your scores, whereas I think the favourites (starred) should be in the counting of scores.

Im sure other skritterers will help...
Cheers and good luck!

I agree. Not like Anki is handling leeches (deleting them), but it would be nice to somehow make those words visible.
The current feature, that I can look up one word's information, how long I've studied this particular word, when it was added,...is nice, but as long as I can't list/filter those, it has no practical use.

James, if the Skritter Gods smile on you then they will run a custom script to generate this list for you.

Adding the ability to do this on your own from My Words is probably simpler to setup and more versatile than the old leech detection beta they were working on.

Thanks for all your responses. It seems I'm not the only one in favour of this function.

Any chance this might be developed soon, Skritter Team?

I agree with DependableSkeleton, I don't see much benefit from "live" leech detection as it were, but I would really like to be able to view them in my words. It might even be as simple as exporting a list of words with the 'time studied' data, and pasting it into a spreadsheet to sort them rather than making changes to Skritter itself.

I agree with Catherine.

As far as I'm concerned, either:

(1) an "export as spreadsheet" function or

(2) the ability to view words in decending order according to number of unsuccessful reviews in the Words part of the website

would be great.

Great ideas @JamesThompson and @Catherine :). +1 from me.

I have been thinking for several months that Skritter could do more on the analytical side of things

I would totally use that function.

I would like this information also. I tend to see these words that just don't get in my head as easily as other words. It would be cool if they might do something a bit different.

1- they could do an export as above OR
2- generate a leech list on demand and I could study only that list until I have it down.

If they went through the effort to run the script, maybe the word list from it wouldn't be too hard.

Add my vote - I would like something like this too.

Just a point on the method. Simply looking at the number of unsuccessful reviews would give you false positives, so to speak. For example, it would probably show you most of the words that were leeches at some point.

Because of the way spaced repetition works, a word that was a leech, say, a year a go, might have had 50 unsuccessful reviews at the time, then a short concentration of successful reviews, and a few scattered ones since.

I have quite a few words like that, that now show up as "learned" but my success rate is quite low.

So the method would have to include some time frame to view the failed reviews in - say, a certain percentage of failures within the last n number of reviews, or something like that.

*disguises his voice* I would find this feature very useful as well and once agai... I mean, for the first time I would express my wish for this feature... er... to be featured!

This truly would be a great feature! I would definately use it as well.

Well, from the responses here it seems like this would be a popular addition to the website. The "skritterati" have spoken!

Skritter team, are you there? Do you think this could be implemented in the near future? :-)

I'm amused that some users want to put all their leeches in a big pile so they can spend MORE time on them. Sounds like a tar baby for your valuable study time to me. I need a Skritter feature that uses clairvoyance to see the future and tell me which words I can safely ban. Failing that, I am currently banning most words that are not in my spoken vocabulary. Nice that I can "un-ban" them later. Hey, I wonder if un-banning them is the same as adding a new word. Maybe that would approximate what some of you are trying to do. Or you could make a new study list of all your banned items, on a day when you are feeling especially feisty.

Please read the "How to spot leeches"-part of this article: http://www.hackingchinese.com/killing-leeches
That's basically why I want this feature.
To do excactly what with the resulting pile? Well, just read the next section of said article.
I realize that sometimes I don't need the characters (yet) and can ban them but even then it's nice to pick them out of a list of characters that I already know are difficult for me.
Right now I keep banning them manually if I notice that they are leeches but an automatic feature would be neat.

I've added a lot of words to Skritter from reading fiction -- including some words that are very rare. A very rare word that I keep forgetting is exactly the word that I'd be better off banning for six months and coming back to later. I'd really like a feature like this implemented to help me out with that.

I do have a leech score calculation in the Flash web client, but it's not very great. Still useful, but inaccurate enough that I had to turn it off.

I don't have a good script for generating the leech data, but we were talking of automatically including leech notifications or automatic leech listing or something like this in the HTML5/Android version.