I started learning Japanese 9 months ago. At the beginning I tried out shared decks but didn’t like the seemingly random list of words. Then I watched Cure Dolly and her method involved mining from anime and I tried that. I’ve been mining from 2 seasons of a single anime since, because it’s quite a slow process going line by line.
I came across this excellent video today https://youtu.be/ROcSmpXFEn8 talking about やつ and あいつ and how these words are not taught in schools and textbooks. But I encountered them very early in my anime mining and thus they are very familiar to me. Do they appear in those pre-made decks? If not, this is an example of why I’ll stick with anime for my Anki.
But I’d like to get your opinions on possible downsides of my approach. To be fair, I also use Anki to reinforce the vocabulary I learn in Genki. I just don’t use those 5k or 10k decks.
6 comments
Mining yourself is going to take more time, obviously.
Shared deck may not have all of the words for a particular anime, but they should give you at least some background.
You might want to try [jpdb](https://jpdb.io/). It has an SRS with premade decks for a lot of animes, often broken down into episodes. AFAIK there’s no easy way to get these decks into anki yet.
Anime is just a media form, your question depends completely on what type of anime you want to watch.
The kind of Japanese being used in say… Naruto is completely different from shows like Oshi no Ko.
And Seinen shows are much closer to “real” day to day Japanese.
Mining words/sentences you find in content you actually want to consume is infinitely better than learning from silly vocab lists because you actually learn words that are important to what you want to do with the language.
It’s always better to mine your own deck. You can, however, complete a small core deck (e.g. 2k) before starting mining. Just don’t do any larger decks since they consist of words frequent in newspapers, which aren’t going to be very relevant to you.
Don’t make the same mistake I did. Finish the Core 2k deck before starting mining. I skipped the Core 2k and it cost me a lot of time because it makes it a lot harder to find N+1 sentences. Also, after you have the Core 2k memorized you can jump right into reading.
https://anacreondjt.gitlab.io/docs/coredeck/