Should I ditch this anki deck?

5 comments

1. If you feel the deck isn’t suitable for you then delete it. Only you can make that decision.

   There’s plenty of other decks available.

   The Tango books are good. There’s deck floating around the internet for the N5 book. Or if you provide evidence of owning the book. Nukemarine will give you his deck.

2. In general I would not do the entire Core6K but only the Core2K. No matter your goals, the most frequent 2K words from any source are usually safe to learn, as you will need them no matter what. But after the first 2K words things become a lot more specific. If you for instance mostly read light novels and watch anime, there are a ton of words in the Core 6K (which is based on newspaper vocabulary) that you will not encounter for a very very long time. At the same time there are very high frequency words in anime and other popular media that are not in the Core 6K. IMO after the Core2K start making your own flashcards based on content you actually care about.

   As for individual word definitions: The ones I learned from the Core 2K were fine. There are often multiple meanings or alternative usages of a word and Core only covers one of them, but I think that for beginners that might be better. You can learn other meanings or nuances a lot better later when you encounter those words in context.

3. Hey, I’m doing core2k and I’m around nakanaka)). Overall yeah, I met some controversial cards as well, but since they provide example sentence with usage I can always assume correct meaning.

   I still feel the deck is very useful because it covers a lot of common vocabulary I wouldn’t meet myself, now I’m randomly meet vocabulary from the deck in some story it’s very encouraging so I keep going

4. Both of the translations you criticize are probably correct, though.

   なかなか is one of those words that correspond to opposite english words depending on whether they are used with direct or negated verbs, and the sentence you found in the core2k deck is probably 荷物がなかなか**届きません**。which has a negated verb.

   And while the version of the core2k deck that I happen to have has another translation for ずっと, it has the example sentence 父は休みの日はずっとテレビを見ている。and there translating it (in it’s “throughout” meaning) as “all day” is perfectly plausible.

   Sentence cards are no panacea, either.

5. I’ve been doing core 2.3k but I’ve now more or less abandoned it for similar reasons. The way the deck presents vocab to you with absolutely no context or explanation of the nuance or usage (barring the occasional example sentence) not only makes it much more difficult to actually retain the vocab itself but also leaves you in danger of grossly mis-using it. I’ve found WaniKani, kanjidamage, kanji garden and bunpro to all be vastly better