Kaishi 1.5k is fun

One day last year I nerd-sniped myself (again): I started digging around in some Japanese learners' communities, looking at the tools and methods they use. Not with the intent to adopt them myself; I don't really have a use for them. I was just very impressed with the level of technical sophistication and thought and effort that went into making it all happen. And even though the initial setup could be quite complex, it seemed that the resulting system would be pleasant to use.

But during all this, I found multiple people on reddit praising "Kaishi 1.5k", which turned out to be a flashcard deck for Anki that should teach you 1,500 Japanese words. I thought, hey, that could be fun to try!

Reader: it was. 😀

I have only used Anki sporadically before, and only for my own decks, so this was the first time I downloaded a complete one and started using it daily.

I've also installed the Review Heatmap addon that shows streaks and this nice usage graph.

It turned out to be crucial: the "make number go up" mindset kicked in and provided extra motivation. I broke the streak once after 11 days, then re-started it, and today marks the 365th day of the streak.

As you can see from the graph, there were long (dark red) stretches where I only reviewed a couple of cards on the given day. It got to the point where I wondered whether it even made sense to keep up the streak just for its own sake. But it did: even if I did the barest minimum, it at least prevented me from forgetting about it completely, which in turn made it easier to start again properly.

The deck aims to help you start reading Japanese, which, frankly, I don't plan to do. To be at least somewhat fluent, I would have to spend far more time than I'm willing and able to. But the Kaishi deck is so well made that it was still useful, even when not used as intended: There is audio for pronunciations and example sentences, so even if I often 'skipped' the kanji, I still learned new vocabulary and improved my comprehension.

At my casual pace, it took me almost the entire year to get through all of the words in the list, and according to the Review Heatmap addon, it took me only under 80 hours of study.
I'm not much for watching movies or TV series, but maybe once every 6 months I watched some anime in the original Japanese dubbing for some language exposure, and every time it felt like I understood more than before. That, combined with the fact that I did still learn to read a lot better even when that was not my focus, makes the entire endeavor worth it.

PS: when my streak started climbing into the hundreds I felt really anxious about breaking it, but I don't think it will be a problem after crossing this one-year mark. I don't plan to drop it intentionally, at least not yet. But if it happens I won't cry over it. Probably. I think.