I check my Progress stats pretty often. It bugs me a little that I have not learned all the characters & words that I've added.

For example: I've added 667 characters, but only learned to write 663. I've added 671 character definitions, but only learned 670.

Is there a way to get a list of the characters & words I've added but still haven't learned so I can cram them for 20 minutes or so and finally learn them?

If you cram something for 20 minutes or so does it mean you really learn it?

Yes. It does.

The reason they aren't learnt according to Skritter is that you haven't managed to get them right with a minimum period of 12 hours between reviews.

Thanks Byzanti!

@atdlouis How would that be different from studying "Everything"?

Don't forget, you will probably always be a few short of your final number. That is because you have forgotten something. The more I learn, the higher my numbers in Skritter, the lower my retention rate is. When reviewing some obscure poetic word I learned six months ago, there is a good chance I will have forgotten it for a few reviews.

Sadly, we aren't computers. I wish we could just write it to the neural hard drive and be done with it, but most of us can't.

Those numbers also aren't extremely accurate; it's possible for them to get out of sync a little for a variety of reasons. I wouldn't sweat it.

@Nick,
I can understand that they might get out of sync, but it would still be interesting to me to know which words or characters I don't yet know, so I would second a request for this feature. Even if there was a way to sort the "my words" by "known" so that I can see which ones are the least known would be useful.

If you turn alpha features off and go to the vocab lists viewer tool, you can still sort to see which items are least known. But it's typically not as interesting as one might think--they're always things that you just added or forgot, and they'll change soon. We're removing that sort because the performance penalty for keeping the items indexed like that isn't worth it.

jw1066, Skritter has a feature that allows you to "star" characters. I use this for difficult characters that give me problems. I access them later as a separate study list and cram them to better memorize them.

When I looked at the Progress Viewer totals, I would see that Skritter would count characters that it had considered I hadn't really learned yet. I was hoping to make those characters into a list so that I could drill them to better memorize them. Does that make sense?

Because of the spacing effect, it doesn't help as much to overpractice things in short interval. You actually learn something better by waiting longer to practice it (assuming you're still able to recall it). So if you drill a character ten times in a day, you may have learned it less well than if you drilled it three times over a week. It can sometimes actually be worse to throw in extra practice like you're suggesting.

This is why we don't usually learn much in school. There's some more information here:
http://www.skritter.com/spaced-repetition

@west316
"The more I learn, the higher my numbers in Skritter, the lower my retention rate is."

I don't know about this. I had the hardest time learning my first ten characters properly. It really seemed like it took forever. Think about how hard it was to remember little details that you don't even think about being a problem now, like stroke order. Think about how hard it was to remember the stroke order on a character that has over 10 strokes! That's like remembering an entire sentence now. By chunking material even I can read simple sentences.

Nick - would be good to keep some way of knowing which characters are least known, but I agree that the current sort by known emphasises the recent blunders.