Hello! I’ve been using Wanikani and the Anki Wanikani deck for around 3 months. I decided I wanted to expand my vocabulary as well, using a Core 2k deck. However, I’ve noticed that I just cannot remember any of the Core 2k cards. For reference, the cards look like this:Front: [https://files.catbox.moe/3antg4.png](https://files.catbox.moe/3antg4.png)Back: [https://files.catbox.moe/ohv0pb.png](https://files.catbox.moe/ohv0pb.png)
However, with the Wanikani deck, I have almost 97-98% retention rate. What are your favorite Core decks, if any? Any recommendations for me? Thanks a lot in advance!
6 comments
There’s actually a WaniKani deck.
Try the Tango N5 and N4 anki decks.
I also had a bad experience with the Core 2k deck when I went through it. For me, the difficulty was in being able to read kanji I had not yet learned whatsoever. Another gripe was that, after you pass the *really* common words, you get into a lot of business-y words, due to the deck being built from newspaper occurrence. And the kanji for those were quite hard at times.
Are you doing Wanikani *along with* doing a WaniKani Anki deck? Or just the WaniKani Anki deck itself? If you are doing WaniKani, that would make sense why the vocab deck is much easier, since it’s material you’re already also covering in WaniKani, along with targeted learning of the necessary kanji.
Learning vocab without furigana is a must, but sometimes it is too difficult to learn 10-20 new words *and* the kanji for them every day. That’s a lot to ask.
WaniKani teaches plenty of vocab. Are you sure you don’t want to just go through WaniKani faster? If not, here are my recommendations:
1. Keep doing WaniKani, and keep doing your WaniKani vocab Anki deck if you find it useful and time well spent.
2. Supplement it with another vocab deck that is not based on newspaper frequency, such as the [Core 2.3k V3](https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/1146263310) (actually only 1970 cards now) deck, which is built based on word frequency in books, blogs, magazines, and more.
3. For this supplemental deck, suspend all notes that are duplicate words from your WaniKani Anki deck. If 夜 is in the WaniKani deck, suspend it from the other deck. It’s better to learn a word through WaniKani, where you will also be learning the kanji, than to come across the word at a random other time.
4. When reviewing this deck, spend more time on each card looking at the kanji before flipping it, and after flipping it, coming up with a way to remember the kanji. If the kanji is built up solely of components you have learned in WaniKani, then perfect, it will be relatively easy. If not, just give it your best shot. If you know 氵and 文 components from WaniKani, then you can figure out a way to remember 済む good enough. (if 済む is in the WaniKani deck though, learn it there!)
5. Since you will be spending more time per card in this deck, set it to give you fewer new cards per day. The words will be harder, so you will fail more often, so having fewer cards you need to learn will help. For example, of you’re doing 10 WaniKani cards a day, perhaps stick to 3-5 new cards per day for this deck. If you’re doing 5 WaniKani words per day, try 2 for this deck. Test it out, and if it’s too difficult, tone it down some
YMMV.
I think it’s great you want to supplement WaniKani with additional vocab. WaniKani, as far as I know, gives a great foundation for vocab, so this would be a great way to fill in the gaps. I think it is too early to be sentence mining. Good luck!
That actually looks like a really neat version of the Core decks. I have seen several people here complain about not being able to find a good one in the past. Can you share which one this is?
As for your problem: As somebody else already mentioned, the Tango decks are a little easier. Having said that, all the words in the Core 2k are important words to learn. I’d rather try to figure out what’s going wrong than try to find a new deck. What’s your retention on mature cards? What are the ones you currently fail? Is it the ones with kanji you have not yet encountered in WK?
Use [jpdb](https://jpdb.io/), make sure kanji cards are on and you lock vocabulary if their kanji haven’t been learned yet. Create a deck from top frequency words and go wild.
FWIW, this also makes the WaniKani deck pretty redundant, so you can cut it out and just immerse or focus on grammar go to the gym or something with your new spare time.
Might the problem be the font you are using in the core 2k deck?
I’ve just finished the 2k portion of the 2k/6k core deck and in ankidroid it looks [like this](https://i.imgur.com/LKgQiN9.png).
For me the fancy font you have makes it much harder to actually recognize the Kanji.