For people that have used Anki successfully, do you add words you want to learn to your usual deck(s)? Or make a separate one?

22 comments

1. I dont use anki, but i use an srs system similar to anki, if were talking strickly vocab i have a couple different sets.. one for my jplt vocab and one for vacab focused on media i wish to enjoy.. (music, anime, light novels, manga)

   so im always adding vocab to my jplt set from a jplt list thats updated twice a year, i do like 10 a day ish depending on my srs accuracies.. higher acc means i add, lower means i study more to get that acc up.. i hover betwen 60-80%..

   And my media set uses text analysis to add words depending on what media i want to consume.. for example songs, i find the lyrics online, plug em into the analyzer, add all the unique words to my set… i study them for a bit, then ill add the song to my playlist to listen to..

2. Separate deck. I have a deck called “Japanese Immersion” where I put all my cards that I made myself while immersing. This is the only deck I use now and I completely dropped my other pre-made decks since they became too easy for me after a while.

3. I only use self-made decks. I have one big deck for general vocabulary, and then a few for special categories like 四字熟語, onomatopoeia, grammatical terms (like 受身/passive voice) etc.

4. I don’t use any premade decks, just one big vocab deck + a kanji deck. The words are all things I find while reading and stuff, added through yomichan.

5. I think it’s generally good to aim to have as few decks as possible. For my regular vocab deck, I used to just add all words to one big deck. Otherwise, my brain would use information like “I’m currently doing deck X so this must be word Y not word Z from the other deck” to recall the words, which makes reviewing artificially easier and is counterproductive since words in real life are not neatly ordered into different decks.

6. The anki developers recommend having as few decks as possible. Ideally you should have one deck per “area” you want to work on. This means, one deck for vocab, one deck for grammar (if you do grammar study) and one deck for kanji. Don’t do things like one deck for adjective, one deck for nouns, one deck for names, one deck for particles, etc. They are a waste of time and actually make it harder to schedule a healthy review load.

7. I only keep one sentence mining deck. If I want to know where it’s from to trigger memories of the context, I’ll just include the title on a separate line after the sentence on the same field.

8. Starting off I used Jlabs begginer Japanese and RRtk simultaneously. After that I deleted them and now it’s just one big vocab deck that includes pitch accent, definition in English, audio of the word, and the sentence it was in.

   I really hate anki but it works. Try and do it first thing in the morning while your mind is still fresh.

9. use my own deck

   1 deck for the most part

   have about 10k cards (uh…has this become my life…)

10. usual deck, only separation i do is kanji and vocab. i used to separate vocab decks per media i learned from, but run into exact problem someone else described where i would remember words per association instead of, yk, learning the word itself, so i just keep two decks now. honestly i should probably merge the kanji and vocab ones too, but i mjust used to my current structure and it tricks my brain into thinking i have less review cards than i actually do lmao

11. I used to make 100 cards per deck…but I would group the decks under something like 日本語 so I can study all my decks at the same time during a review session (and let SRS do its thing)…so this is technically not any different than just having everything under one deck…idk I just didn’t want to see a single deck having thousands of words lol. I would also re-add words I may have already seen but couldn’t remember during my reading to reinforce learning.

    I don’t use any prebuilt decks. I feel like if you pulled that word from something you read, you have a much better chance of making it stick and prebuilt decks are just random words someone thinks you should study, usually without any example sentences..those kinds of things can stick, but it can take twice, maybe even 4 times as long as it would take a word that you pulled directly from input…plus, knowing how to use words (among other things) will help you get better at speaking 🙂

12. I keep it very simple, I just have one deck. Anytime I come across a word I don’t know, I add the word to the deck. Some of the cards are phrases, idioms, or occasionally a rare grammar construction, but the vast majority are just vocabulary that I come across.

    I guess I don’t do a separate kanji deck because I’m a heritage Chinese speaker, so I get to cheat with Kanji :-p.

13. So after finishing a good intro deck (I highly suggest Tango N5 and then N4 if you like) I started using a separate deck for my mined words.

    I suggest mining words with frequency in mind. That doesn’t mean just look at a frequency list and learn them in order, instead what you should do is use a tool like Yomichan or Migaku and load in a good frequency list.as you immerse you can create cards as you go with frequently used words. I suggest the Netflix frequency list, the top shonen list or the top slice of life list (though I am biased because I made them).

    Words have value. A word like “chair” might be worth a lot more than a word like “fratricide” for instance. Learning japanese with a focus on common words first will help you understand the language faster. I suggest sticking to the most common 5k words at first and then moving up to 10k and 15k later on. If you want to primarily learn with anime then using the Shonen list or Slice of life list might help you get to a level of understanding even faster for those genres. Words also have value to you, so if there is an uncommon word you want to learn because it fits our life (焙煎 is pretty important to me) then don’t let frequency hold you back.

14. I don’t use pre-made decks, only my own. I have one main deck which I have words and sentences mined from anime.

    I also add new words from textbooks and Japanese class into the same deck, but with a different tag. If I want to just study those I use the custom study mode.

15. One deck for vocab and grammar. Ran into the same problem Dabedu mentioned with multiple decks. I combined my original core deck with my mining deck and have about 11000 cards now.

16. I don’t know if I qualify for answering this question. I’m at ~1600 words learned in Anki. I can understand simple language in games and I also recently understood 80% of an interview about a game without opening a dictionary.

    I use 3 decks. 1 for Grammar, 1 for learned vocabs and 1 for new vocab. It used to be 1 single deck from uni when I studied Japanese studies for 2 semesters. I migrated all mined words into that deck and differentiate the source through tags. So uni is it’s own tag and each game gets their own tag. I also made a “games” tag because I also want to use different sources in the future.

    I made a “new vocab” deck because I ran into the pitfall of becoming hyper motivated -> learning many new words -> losing interest -> dropping Anki for a few months -> reviewing the 1000+ missed cards -> repeat.

    Now I have the main deck with sub 50 reviews on any day and I fill it up with new words from the new deck when I fall to a low review count per day. Now if I lose interest, I’ll at least be able to review the main deck daily in a reasonable amount of time (10 minutes). This will at least keep me in shape during motivation draughts.

17. I chunk mine according to how I encounter them. If I encounter them for work theyre in the work deck, and in my general deck for everything else. echoing everyone else, too many decks can bog you down!

18. The only decks I’ve ever had are the first deck I ever used to learn the most common words then the deck I made from immersion. Anything more is unnecessary.

19. I make decks of words by theme (verbs, adjectives, body parts, city places, nature, etc) it helped me tremendously. Oh, and no translation on the cards!

20. Merged the 2k deck into my own when I finished it. Can’t be bothered with seperate decks nowadays, everything is just getting put into the same deck, its got a pretty big backlog so I just have it set to give me the cards in a random order, that works well for me. It does seem to have a recency bias tho, if I add a bunch of cards in a day, then like 50% of the new cards the next day will be from that new batch, which is great when since it probably relates to whatever im reading.

21. I make a new deck every week.

    I usually create a bulk of cards on Sunday after my Japanese tutor lesson. I also create cards as I go furing the week from vocab that I read in the news/novels and hear on podcasts that I feel is popping up often and I should know it.

22. I have a separate deck for each “feed” of cards but that’s it. So each shared deck I download stays it’s own deck and I have 1 “vocab” deck for cards I made. When I finish all the new cards from a shared deck I merge it into my vocab deck