As of today I’ve finished the Nihongoshark.com Kanji deck for Anki. That means I’ve at least seen all 2136 Jōyō Kanji plus 64 extra ones Heisig added. Since this is a pretty big milestone for me and it may be helpful to other potential Japanese learners, I want to talk a little bit about my experience with it.

TL:DR: I had success with and recommend this system for learning Kanji but be aware of the pitfalls I list at the bottom of the page.

I’m not gonna explain the method of learning extensively here, you’re better off reading the original description for that. Sadly the article was deleted from the Nihongoshark site but luckily someone saved a snapshot of it in the archive.
And just in case, here’s a link to the Nihongoshark Anki deck.

Personal experience

I’ve started with this method around December of 2019, going until February. In that timespan I got to about 1000 Kanji with little hick-ups, doing roughly 10-20 new ones per day. At 1000 I hit a plateau though and ultimately stopped, due to uni taking up more time again.

Having watched a friend start with this method recently too, he also hit a plateau at the 1000 Kanji mark. I suspect that may be a point at which one might becoming a little overwhelmed by the amount learned, easy cards from the beginning resurfacing and thus reaching really high review counts.

My break lasted from February until August. At that point almost every single of the 1000 cards was up for review. I had hit the infamous Anki Avalanche.

Digging through the Avalanche

For the uninitiated, the Anki Avalanche refers to the situation where you neglect to do your regular card reviews and thus at one point you’re faced with an insurmountable amount of pending reviews, many of which you will have forgotten and thus have to relearn from scratch. Within the Anki community you only really read of two possible strategies:

1. Reset the deck and start completely from scratch.
2. Grit your teeth and do nothing but reviews (as in no new cards) for a good while

Option 1 is terrible for motivation, as it will feel like you’ve just deleted your hard earned progress. Option 2 however means you’ll be treading in place and have to do heaps of reviews per day to outrun the influx of new reviews. Either way, it’s a bad place to be in.

I ended up choosing Option 2, resulting in me doing around 200 Reviews per day for a good month. In hindsight I feel this was the better way to do it for me, although the month does appear with many skipped days in my statistics.

After having dug myself out of the avalanche, I was able to do 10 new cards per day up until the end pretty consistently.

From my part this was the only great issue in my experience. I want to emphasize, while I write that I “did 10 new cards everyday” I obviously am not perfect. I skipped days, even weeks sometimes. Be aware that this will happen, you will simply not pull through some days, weeks or maybe months. However even then this task is surmountable, so keep reviewing.

Issues with the Deck

Apart from human errors, the deck itself also has some flaws I wanna highlight.

Synonyms

Spread throughout the deck are multiple clusters of cards that are synonyms of each other. Heisig tried his best to differentiate Kanji with similar meanings by using, sometimes very obscure, synonyms as their meaning. As such you for example have a cluster of 3 Kanji all describing some variation of “yearning”.

• 慕(pining)
• 憧(yearn)
• 欲(longing)

When learning these characters it’s almost inevitable (for me at least) to mix their meanings up, no matter what stories I try.

Meanings

Heisig also sometimes chooses false meanings for Kanji. And the people at Nihongoshark simply copied them 1-to-1, at least in this version of the deck. The koohiStories per card (example mnemonics) sometimes point that out, however only sometimes. One example is 陪. In the deck it’s listed as “auxiliary”. A dictionary is gonna tell you “obeisance” is the first meaning though. In some cases Heisig simply chose second or tertiary meanings of Kanji to keep them distinct. Here it’s the learners responsibility to double check meanings if they feel completely off. This might seem like a big deal, however it really is the rare exception rather than the rule. Even if you learn the wrong meanings for a couple of Kanji, when learning proper vocabulary those errors should be fixed.

Radicals

Choosing recognizable meanings for the radicals is imperative for success with this method. Largely the recommended ones were sufficiently well suited for me. There were a couple that, either through language or cultural barrier (the book being written for English speakers and me not being a native speaker) lead to more confusion than good. Be it simply vocabulary I didn’t know and had no image in mind for, or cartoon characters I wasn’t familiar with. While this was a hindrance it simply took a little bit of mental effort to either adopt the meaning as is or think of a better one.

A bigger problem are radicals with doubling meanings. As described in the article, Kanji have other Kanji as radicals in them. Heisig often gives the proper meaning for a new Kanji but then assigns a completely unrelated meaning to it when it’s used as a radical in another Kanji. This leads to confusion quickly, as you may see a specific Kanji as a radical in others many times and start associating the radical meaning with the Kanji rather than the actual one.

Kanji order

One might wonder why there are seemingly useless characters in this set, such as several flower or tree names. You’d expect a official list of characters to achieve literacy to simple contain the most common characters, probably ordered by how common they are. This is not the case here

1. because Jōyō Kanji are meant as a base set of characters that you need to understand official Japanese documents. However some obscure characters are in there as they appear in the Japanese constitution.
2. because the Heisig method builds on the concept of radicals, as such the deck is ordered so that you will almost always first learn the radical and then Kanji it’s used in.

Tips

With these issues named, I wanna give a couple of pointers on how to mitigate them:

• Make yourself a chart for Kanji with similar writing and/or similar meanings and learn them out of band
• Double check meanings if they feel off. That’s easiest done by copy-pasting the Kanji into Jisho.
• Spend time choosing good Radicals. If you notice one doesn’t work for you, change it!
• Try to use Kanjis original meanings for their radical meanings to avoid confusion.
• If you notice a radical name or mnemonic doesn’t stick, don’t try to force it in but rather change it.
• Do. Your. Reviews.

Future

As for the next steps in learning this language I plan on continuing the reviews on the Kanji for a good while longer as I’ve by no means committed them all to memory yet. Parallel to that I’m going to start working through the Core2k vocabulary deck, paying special attention to getting the readings for Kanji in as you essentially skip that step in the Nihongoshark method.

EDIT 29.12.2020: Having looked around some more I’ve decided to work through the (so far quite excellent) Tae Kim’s Guide to Japanese Grammar. That way I’ll pick up some vocabulary along with properly learning basic grammar, which is more important to me at the moment to get to some point where I can start actively understanding the language.

I hope you too find this method of “Hacking the Kanji” and my accompanying tips useful. Thank you for reading!