The last several days were full of repetitions, with Day 8 getting as high as 460 cards per day. Other days were more manageable with about 250 cards. In any case, today I was going to do sentences numbered 550-600. And on sentence number 586 the first group of sentences keyed to HSK Basic level came to an end. I started the next group and started to meet unfamiliar characters right away. At first I thought I'd continue despite the unknown characters, after all this way I'd be able to learn them in context, in real words. But after giving it a try I've decided to can it. It does not feel right — trying to learn a sentence without having a firm knowledge of all the characters. Finally I've understood why Heisig method requires you not to work with characters while you are learning them: it's because of what happens when you meet an unfamiliar character. Either you already know all graphemes it is built of, or you don't. If you don't, you'll have to invent them, or learn the character by brute force: neither is very good. If you know the components, then the character will be in the book somewhere, so you just have to be careful not to learn it with a different "keyword" — less problematic, but still not optimal.
So I'd be pausing the "1000 sentences" project to do the Heisig book, Remembering Traditional Hanzi 1". The 1500 characters in it would probably more or less correspond to the next HSK level, and that'll give me 1000 more sentences in this database.
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