Does the progress section keep count of the characters leart via Sratchpad with Tracking OFF ? If , for instance, I make a custom list and study the characters using Scratchpad with Tracking off, will those words be counted in the Progress section ?

No.

What have you got against studying 'everything'? In the long run it's got to help you out a lot more.

AFAIK "tracking off" means just that, it doesn't remember anything once you close the Scratchpad.

James

P.S. I agree with Byzanti. Trust the algorithm...

Thanks for the replys James and Byzanti.

Can one of you please tell me what exactly an algorithm is and why it's so great ?

By algorithm he means how Skritter decides when to show you the character again.

By letting Skritter schedule stuff it tries not to waste your time. So, if you're really good at a character you wont see it much, as you don't need to. If you're bad at a character you'll see it a lot more, until you know it better.

It tries to make characters appear at the best time possible.

By using the scratchpad you have to rely on your own scheduling which wont be as good. You'll forget a lot more. Less efficient.

Some years ago I used to make paper flash cards to study Spanish. I still have several thousand of them. When you get up to a large number of cards you simply can't practically review all of them every time you sit down to study, as you'll spend all day reviewing stuff you don't need to and you'll never learn anything new. If, on the other hand, you never review old cards, you will build up a huge mass of cards that you really don't know, and you will forget most of the items because you never review them.

So, what many people do is they have different piles (containers, whatever) where they put the flash cards to try to separate the cards that are new and should be reviewed soon from the older cards that are better-known and don't need to be reviewed right away. And if you do review an older card and get it wrong, it goes into the "new" pile and gets reviewed quickly to make sure you've relearned it properly. There are different systems for this but they all hinge on the idea that you should focus on troublesome things rather than reviewing stuff you already know, but you do have to review stuff you already know at some point.

That whole system is much better handled by a computer, which can actually track each individual card and try to predict the ideal time for a review. So in the case of the Scratchpad, let's say you ran through a list of 100 characters a month ago. How many of those characters do you still know? How many have you forgotten? Well, you don't actually know unless you go through the whole list again. Imagine that you get up to 1,000 characters. Are you going to go through the whole list of 1,000 every time? No, it's impractical. So, trust the algorithm. Let Skritter schedule reviews for you by doing "practice everything". If you have a test coming up tomorrow, or have gotten through all your reviews and want to focus on learning items from a certain list, use "Cram", but that should be the exception rather than the rule.

James

DON'T QUESTION THE ALGORITHM

Thanks James and everyone else!