Quite a lot below, summarised: where I'm at now with Skritter, what do people do when they reach an advanced level with Skritter, and what comes after Skritter?

Full version below.

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When I recently took up Skritter again I subscribed to new lists to give me a greater variety of vocabulary to study. There's some great specialised lists - I've gone through the car brands list, an working my way through the countries of the world list, have completed the metal elements list, and am making good progress on the Chinese people you should know list.

I also added some character lists - classical Chinese characters, Tang poems and Shi Jing, and other frequency lists. The Chengyu, idiom, old HSK, and TOCFL lists are also queueing up for completeness.

Yesterday I did a little housekeeping when I figured out that some of the characters in my lists were pretty obscure. Several characters in the classical Chinese character lists don't actually have definitions or translate to something obscure which I don't understand in English. I decided I didn't mind skipping a few of the ancient weapons and war tools in the metals list. I've turned off the sections from the lists that are unusually heavy in Latin plant names, undefined characters and remote place names.

The remainder of my lists are mostly relatively common words that I think will be useful to learn for daily communication. There's quite a long way to go still - my guess is 1-2k new characters and words.

At this point if I keep on it will take me quite a while to finish adding all the lists, but probably not that long - I guess a few months if I keep up a decent practice rate.

It's a short enough period of time that I'm starting to think what comes next after that. I could carry on adding more and more obscure characters - I read Olle's blog post over at http://blog.skritter.com/2014/05/how-skritter-helped-me-stop-worrying.html and see he's already learned nearly 6k characters. I guess at that point there's not too much further to go in terms of useful characters to learn.

There's another article linked there about the dangers of list overdose. At the moment Skritter's a *very* convenient way to study for me. I can fit in a few minutes each way on my daily commute, in my lunch break, or at the weekends without having to spend time doing "metastudy" tasks like looking for new materials and thinking about what to study next. However I think I now need to think about what happens as I start to get less marginal benefit from my Skritter time.

As more of my time gets spent on less useful items, and the items available to add become less and less common, I think I'll want to think more about additional ways to study.

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One thing I'm curious about is for those who are still here but have a lot of characters under their belts: pts, Nick, Roland, Olle, and so on, do you still use Skritter? Just for reviewing old characters or are you still adding new items. If you're still adding, how do you decide what to add at this point?

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Another thing I'm thinking about is if I do start to spend less time per day on Skritter, what I can replace it with that can be as convenient. I love the sense of progress, the efficiency, and the fact you can study for a minute or an hour without spending any unnecessary time on thinking about what to study.

Is there anything else out there that offers a similar experience for another aspect of the language? Maybe the best thing is a series of podcasts and just listening to one a day, or going through a book but it doesn't seem quite the same as the atomic learning experience that Skritter offers.

I remember listening to some podcasts when I was studying for HSK and felt like I was repeating a lot of easy stuff that I already understood and struggling again and again with some of the harder parts. I guess a book might be similar.

Perhaps the answer is to spend more time with real world materials and situations and not to think so much about the learning efficiency, but I feel a bit spoilt by Skritter. Would welcome thoughts from others here on how to wean myself off Skritter and what might come next.

Well, what do you want to be good at?

Sounds like you are very good at Skrittering, and the character recognition will be super useful as you read real-world materials.

Perhaps nuke your Skritter list, start reading, add new characters, or ones that you need to reinforce more, back to Skritter. Spend more time on listening, grammar, speaking, and other parts of the language that need more work.

I want comment on my project to learn 6000 characters. Don't do it unless you're really interested in learning characters. Very, very few of these characters are actually useful and my girlfriend who is an educated native speaker frequently says she has never seen many of the characters I now review. I don't do this because I imagine it will be useful but because I find it interesting and I want to know more about how to learn characters.

In general, though, there are so many things you could do, I don't even know where to start. If we stay in the reaml of vocabulary, you could keep learning common words or expression with the characters you already know, including how to use them. This should keep you occupied for the rest of your life! :) Joking aside, as others have said, there's a lot more than vocabulary, but there's certainly enough of that if that's what you're after.

Start reading on a daily basis;, newspapers, books, magazines, Im sure youll find a lot of new material to add to skritter.
Also, (if you havent) study boya advanced series, thats a really helpful and interesting textbook with a great variety of contemporary writers.

Plus Chinese editions of great manga (e.g. GTO) and start liking all sorts of Taiwanese Facebook pages!

Reading Chinese books can have a similar sort of progress feel if you find a decent way to track your reading speed increasing over time. If you can get your reading speed up, you can read a ton of books and it'll be fun, bite-sized even–plus it'll tell you exactly what you need to add to Skritter, because it'll be the words you keep not knowing. (Disclaimer: my reading speed is still pretty slow.)

As far as practicing listening/speaking, I haven't had that sort of same convenient, skill-matched practice experience with anything I've tried.

Speaking as someone currently living and studying in China, I've found that studying calligraphy and penmanship is a great pleasure. I'm currently learning fountain pen calligraphy in the running (cursive) script and just love it. I'm not sure what the best way of studying this in the west would be, but in China there's plenty of instructors for this.

I agree with the previous comments: reading "real life" material is something that at the same time will help you to practically test your reading skills, and is also a useful/entertaining task.

However, in my opinion there is an issue on that. How could you know what books, papers, essays, etc., are better to your level? If you were a pure "HSK oriented student" there are some books out there that take this into account, and adapt some literature to the number of characters you are expected to know at that HSK level.

But if you have studied your own way, how could you determine if you are able to read certain novel or essay? Once you are an advanced student it is obvious that you will find now and then some characters or grammar constructions you do not understand, but if you are still in the middle of that path (as I am: just passed HSK4 and started learning for HSK5) it is not that easy to find out which is the best choice to practice my reading and at the same time not to feel frustrated by the amount of hanzi I do not know (yet).

By the way, now that I mention grammar... reaching 5000 hanzi in Skritter does not imply you are good at chinese, only at reading/writing/pronouncing/understanding WORDS. But... what have you done to improve your grammar at the same time? Maybe that could be another "what next..." scenario, I do not know.

In any case, thanks for sharing your experience and expectations. Very interesting.