I tried the core 2.3k deck that’s often recommended and really struggled with the cards being random words, and could hardly get my retention up to a level that actually made it fun. I ended up dropping it and have been trying to figure out what I should actually use that might be easier to retain.
As far as I know, Tango is usually recommended but I’ve heard a few bad things about it, such as sentences not making grammatical sense sometimes and all vocab being in a certain tense rather than neutral.
My other thought was Refold’s vocab deck, especially since V3 just came out. I don’t mind paying for it if it’s generally a really good deck!
Overall just looking for something that may be a bit better for me, whether that be Tango, Refold or something else. Feel free to recommend another deck, since I’m totally clueless aside from these few. Open to whatever:)
10 comments
It depends on your goal. Tango is made to give you words you might need to know to express yourself in various contexts. Refold is made to give you words you will need to know to understand Japanese.
All the popular decks (Tango, Core2k, Core2.3k, Refold, Nayr5k, …) are good choices and it comes down to personal preference more than anything. Frankly I would not overthink it. Browse through the first ~100 cards each and then stick with the one you like best. If you cannot decide then in my opinion Tango is the easiest one.
I made my own one? Started with genki vocab, then I just started reading a lot and add to the deck
If you only look at the list of words taught, and what order they are taught, then I assume that the core 2.3k and refold decks will be the best. Those decks were curated for a specific purpose: teach the highest frequency and most important words, in order of frequency and/or importance. The Tango decks (more accurately, the JLPT Tango books) were curated for passing the JLPT. Different target audience, different purpose.
But for me, the true value of a pre-made deck is in the quality of the context sentences. For this purpose, the Tango decks are top tier. Professional, consistent quality voice acting. Around 80-90% of the sentences are i+1, and probably 98% are i+2 at worst. In terms of comprehensible input, I haven’t seen better. The Tango decks should fit just about every learning style, even (especially) for learners who get barely any comprehensible input (e.g., grammar and vocab study only).
If the vocabularies do not stick I think it is a problem in something else, not the deck.
I would ask, what else do you do to learn Japanese except for Anki?
Just make your own one. 100 times more effective than these premade ones
I used WaniKani 2: Electric Boogaloo almost exclusively and it served me well. I don’t know if it’s efficient to split up vocab into Reading and Meaning cards but I can say that using it worked.
try reading visual novels with yomichan. it’ll give you a better feel as to how sentences operate. I had the same problem as you i hated 2k.
But i can comfortably read 2k sentences and the words stick now as I can apply them
I had the same experience at first. I did the tango N5 and N4 decks and it took until around half of the N5 deck before I started to increase my retention and for the words to actually stick. I would say go with the Refold deck or if you don’t want to spend the money, the tango N5 deck.
The tango deck is probably going to be the easiest since they’re sentence cards, however it contains some words that are completely pointless to learn as a beginner such as, [年賀状](#fg “ねんがじょう”) – New Year’s Card
You could just delete those cards when you come across them though.
Make your own.