I know it’s unlikely… but never zero. We can’t check each card if it’s actually accurate. Check all 2k cards? No. So we’re going to have to blindly trust it, right?
I know I’m being paranoid.
So what Anki desk do you guys trust and have actually USED what you learned from said Anki deck?
How long have you been using it?
5 comments
Very interesting point of view.. I made my deck from scratch based on notes from school and words I looked up in the dictionary. Would you trust yourself?
I add cards to my deck whenever I hear/see new words. So from anime/games/conversation/youtube/etc. Been doing it for a couple years maybe even. These are all words I encountered and didn’t know but wished I did, so every single one is useful
That’s basically what services like Wanikani are for. You spend money on people putting together a deck properly and maintaining it over the years.
It’s true that some of those public Anki decks are at least questionable, but that’s just the trade-off you make when you get stuff for free.
Honestly the best option is making your own deck based on how you see words used (not just simple dictionary lookups, research actual example sentences too, but not the crowd-sourced ones from tatoeba that jisho shows).
I think it’s less of an issue of things being trustworthy, and more an issue of you can’t possibly include all the necessary information for learning the full nuance of a word in a single flashcard, so as long as you go in understanding that, you should be fine. Take everything with a grain of salt, treat flashcards as just a starting point to getting you into using the language, then once you start using/consuming it, you can fine tune your understanding.
If you’re looking for a premade core vocabulary deck, try iKnow. Anki is mostly useful for making your own cards for words you see in the wild, but iKnow has a fantastic core vocabulary course with example sentences and audio for each word.