I also did all three volumes and found the extra 1,000 to be a waste. Really polluted my Anki.
> The time is better invested in simply studying how to distinguish visually similar characters.
But you still have to know what you're distinguishing between, which might only arise after repeated mistakes. Heading off this frustration directly by studying characters may not have been the best use of my time in absolute terms, but it did wonders for my overall motivation and made me feel like I was doing more than treading water. Pre-Heisig I was reading specific books intended for foreign learners, while afterwards I was just reading the newspaper.
It's somewhat a shame there isn't heavily curated Anki decks for doing what I call "disambiguation study" where you focus on cards that help you distinguish similar things from one another. It'd really speed things up.
>But you still have to know what you're distinguishing between, which might only arise after repeated mistakes.
I'm learning Korean at the moment and it's particular brutal for this IMHO. Some words have taken a long time to properly understand due to repeatedly mistaking them for very similar words, and there are a lot of these in Korean.
> The time is better invested in simply studying how to distinguish visually similar characters.
But you still have to know what you're distinguishing between, which might only arise after repeated mistakes. Heading off this frustration directly by studying characters may not have been the best use of my time in absolute terms, but it did wonders for my overall motivation and made me feel like I was doing more than treading water. Pre-Heisig I was reading specific books intended for foreign learners, while afterwards I was just reading the newspaper.