I use Pleco to study flashcards offline, so I add all the words there and then export the list to a file and then add it over here to practise the writing part. But when adding words I ran into the limit of 200 words for a list. Well ok, I'll make a new list for the rest of them. So now I have two lists: One with 200 words in it and one with 43.

My questions:
Why can't I have one big list?

Why does it say 7% complete (186 left), when it also says that I have learned 82 characters in the progress report?

Why does only my first list show up in the study section (I guess I can still click "Study All", but it's still weird)?

You can have one list with multiple sections. The 200 word limit is per section.

Go to your second list (the one that's not showing up in the study section) and click on the green Study List button. Then it will appear on the study page. The Study All button means that you study all of the lists that are already on the study page.

I don't know about your progress report question, but some items on your list probably have multiple characters in them, so you probably know more than 14 characters. Maybe you already study things on another list and that might be adding to the progress report.

@Fylke: I see two lists in your "Adding words from" section, "My Mandarin 2" and "My Mandarin". The progress percentage is based off of how many words have been added from the list and isn't based off of how many individual characters have been learned. Also, if there are words further along in the list that had been learned from previous lists, it won't count that progress until the word adding in the specific list has caught up to "adding" the words that had already been learned/studied. Like DependableSkeleton said, to have one large list you could create a "big list" which allows for multiple sections (at 200 words per section).

Sorry, I just posted another question on this before I spotted the answer here.

Doesn't this mean that the totals will always be wrong if there is overlap with lists you have already studied? I think it would be a very useful feature to have these accurate (or at least close), or be able to get the numbers somehow.

For example, I'm starting lessons next week with a teacher who wants to use the "Short Term Spoken Chinese" books 1&2. I added this to my study list to try to see how much of it I already knew, but it showed less than 10%, which confused me.

It will only show how much you have already learned once you have added through that part of the list–it can't scan the entire list and figure out which parts you haven't added yet from that list but that you know from another list. So if it says 10%, that means you're roughly 10% of the way through the list, not that the remaining 90% doesn't have any words you already know.

It definitely has the data, since it shows which words I know as I browse ahead through the sections that haven't been added yet. Wouldn't it be possible to do a calculation based on the intersection of "my words" with the wordlist and show the percentage remaining on that basis? It seems like a more useful figure.

For example, Skritter says I have 216 words left in HSK3, but in practice it won't actually show me that number, and it could be substantially fewer (it's not 'cos I don't know *that* many from later in the list :)).