I think it would be very helpful to be able to review the components, sounds, characters, and words specifically in the recently learned section of the dashboard inside the “Course Progress” box. My review log is very large, even with me doing review sessions 4-5 times a week, and often I won’t see newly learned components, sounds, characters, and words for a month or more. This makes progress difficult in my experience because I have totally forgotten the new entry by the time I actually get to it in a formal review. I hesitate to do new lessons when I have a large backlog of “new” entries so this makes the process of learning feel very sluggish. It would make sense to me to have a review function that works like the “recent mistakes” review where correct answers do not affect the actual rank of that entry. This way I can get an informal refresher of those entries before I encounter them in the formal review process.
Maybe I misunderstand the issue but wouldn’t you maybe be better off clearing your review backlog before learning new items? It seems like otherwise you may just undermine the effectiveness of the spaced repetition only for the sake of feeling like you are making progress by adding new things.
The ‘recently learned’ section does have an extra study function. Similar to ‘recent mistakes’ you can specify the date range of items learned and filter by type.
I will echo the concern that if your review backlog is such that you feel that you aren’t seeing new items for a month in your review queue, then SRS is not working as intended and you are more likely to struggle retaining new characters than you would otherwise.
Are you completing your total review queue when you have your review session 4-5x each week? If your review limit is set low in the options, then you may need to look at the upper-right corner of the main Review button to check if there are more items remaining. If so, you can click that Review button again to work through more of the remaining queue.
For example, I have my review limit set to 25 items and a daily queue of approx. 200 items. When I complete 25 items I can then take a quick break or check the time, stretch, get more water, whatever’s needed for a moment. Then ideally I will do another 25 and another 25 and so on until all 200ish are complete for the day. If I didn’t finish all 200 that day then any leftover items start to pile up on the next day (so now 200+leftovers) without me seeing them, creating a bigger review queue and making it less likely I will remember items when I review them.
If you like your workflow exactly as is and just wish you could review new items before old items, then you could also just adjust the Review Order in options to see newest items first in reviews.
I hope you find a solve that works for you!
I actually wrote a tampermonkey script specifically for selecting novice 1 entries over the last month in the “recent mistakes” page but that is prone to error as the “new” entries frequently fall outside of one month and finding the exact date for the oldest new entry is cumbersome.
Now that you mention it it makes sense that you are “supposed to” clear your reviews before touching anything new but that is far from clear by the UI. Thinking back on other SSR systems I’ve interacted with they always present you with new stuff after you have cleared your review log but the HanziHero UI puts both the new lesson button and review button on equal footing visually and allows you to do either at your leisure. I would even argue that putting the lesson button before the review button gives precedence to the lesson over the review. Its possible I missed the intended use in the documentation but I can’t recall reading about clearing reviews before doing new lessons.
I will adjust my strategy to what you recommend. If that is the optimal use of this platform the reviews/lessons should be presented that way to the user (or at least presented as an alternative study mode) instead of having them figure that out through the forums or by trial and error, in my opinion. Thanks for your thoughtful comment!
You have a point! Arguably there’s no point in doing more lessons if one isn’t getting their reviews in. The only case I can think of is if one intentionally decides to not clear their reviews one day and wants to keep a lesson streak 
The Review Order is applied to Extra Study too, so if you want to focus on novice items you can try the “Newest First” as a setting and see if that helps.
But as pointed out, there is a technical difference between doing the “newest first” (when you learned it) vs doing “lowest srs stage”, and if it’s out a month or more then it may not work… We can introduce another ordering option if “newest first” isn’t sufficient 
I do think there is more we can do to the app to help with getting used to Novice items. We do have the “Recently Learned”, but ideally one shouldn’t have to think about these things. The SRS algorithm should pick up the slack here if it can. Thanks for the feedback!
I went ahead and added a new setting of Lowest SRS Stage First to the Review Order. Hope it helps!
That’s awesome, thank you!
You should be doing all of your reviews every day. Otherwise the whole point of the srs is defeated. So it’s not surprising you’re struggling to remember things.