As a learner, I'm always trying to look for ways to evolve and progress. One thing I'd like to do now is make my Skritter sessions a bit more efficient.
In Chinese (and Japanese), characters show up over and over again in different words, such as the character 日 in the following words：
日本, 日报, 日期， 生日， 日月潭

I've come to the realization that writing 日 ,and other characters like 日 that show up frequently, over and over again is inefficient. What I would like to do, so that I can finally reach the next stage in my studies, is to find a way for me to quickly/easily find out which words from amongst a new list have characters that haven't previously been learnt. What I plan on doing is isolating the characters that haven't previously been learnt, and practicing writing them in isolation. For the other study parts, such as tones and definitions, I'll leave the lists unchanged and study them just as I always have, but for the writing part I plan on only studying new characters. I use the spaced-repetition review queue everyday and bring the queue down to zero, so that should prevent me from forgetting how to write previously learnt characters.

I vaguely remember someone briefly mentioning something on a thread a while back, about using a program that helps perform this task. There's got to be something good out there that would serve this purpose, and my question is what ?

If anyone out there can tell me what to do, I would really appreciate it !! It's too bad that there isn't a feature like this built into Skritter. I'm sure there'll be one sooner or later

You mean scan a list for new unstudied characters, study only the new characters and then once you learn them go back to practice the actual words in the list?

Yeah, writing the new characters only , and doing tone/definition practise for the words with old characters in them.

Appears that you can just hit next without drawing an easy character and still get credit for knowing the word. So for your 日期 example, you could skip over 日 and just draw 期. Not sure how it affects the stats.

I would definitely go with wakarimasen's suggestion, and simply either hit the space bar or hit next on the easy characters, but still study full new 'words'.

Even for some characters that appear frequently, occasionally I think I know it and then discover I was using perhaps a different character with the same pinyin. I feel like it's important to not just learn to write individual characters, but to make sure you know the correct combination for a given word.

The 'next' button is a great tool for that. If you discover the character in your mind doesn't match up with what popped up on screen, you can always mark it as wrong.

my fancy excel file finds words in a list that contain new characters - if that's the one you were referring to?

@ Neil yes, could you tell me how you do that?

whats your email address

(deleted)

Wouldn't it be great if users could pm each other, without having to post their email publicly?

It's something we've thought about. There hasn't been a lot of demand for it though.

Thanks Neil !!

@neil What I do in this context is post my OWN email address, like this: jww1066, delete this whole part and put in an at sign, gmail.com (I vary the text for fun). Then the other person is free to contact me but I'm not asking them to expose their email address.

And for now you can include your email in your Skritter profile like that.