I finally finished Kaishi. This was really hard for me. I had already tried twice before and failed, but this time I finally did it. I think the biggest reason is that I changed my approach to the deck. My first attempt was back in August 2025. I was doing about 10 new cards a day, but it still took me around an hour every day, and after two weeks I gave up. That was the end of my first attempt at learning Japanese. My second attempt was in March 2026. I was extremely motivated. I had forgotten most of the cards (except very basic things like 私), so I started doing around 20 new cards a day and constantly grinding filtered decks. It took me about 1 hour and 30 minutes every day. Everything was going well until I got the worst flu of my life (I genuinely felt like I was dying). That single flu completely destroyed my motivation, and I was never able to get it back. So, after two weeks, I quit Japanese again. This summer, I had all the time in the world, so I decided to give it another try. This time, however, I approached it differently. I still remembered around 100 words, so the first few days were pretty easy. I was doing about 50 new cards a day. After that, though, I ran into the same problem as before: too many reviews. Even with only 20 new cards a day, my review count quickly became overwhelming. The real problem wasn't learning words, it was kanji. I had no trouble remembering words written in hiragana, but words with kanji felt impossible. Every kanji looked like a random collection of strokes, and none of them stuck in my head. That's when I actually started looking at what kanji are made of. I began learning radicals and common kanji components. Suddenly, kanji weren't abstract anymore, they actually made sense. Even when I didn't know all the radicals in a character, I could still break it down into recognizable parts and analyze it. Kanji finally started sticking in my head. At that point, Kaishi stopped feeling like a chore. I actually started enjoying it. I wasn't relying on motivation anymore, I was simply consistent with my studies. I was able to increase my new cards to 30 per day, which took about 40 minutes, and I also created my own mining deck, where I did another 10 new cards per day. There were also a few other things that helped me get through Kaishi: I read a lot. Reading is basically another form of ssr. I spent much more time learning new cards than relearning old ones, especially when a card introduced a new kanji. I always read the example sentence on new cards. The context is really important. I studied grammar so I could distinguish different word classes (verbs, nouns, adjectives). I also think filtered decks are mostly a waste of time, except when you're trying to deal with a lot of leeches.