So I recently wanted to expand my deck collection for my Japanese studies to learn more specialized knowledge in addition to the sentence mining that I have been doing since ages, like learning all the wards of Tokyo, or knowing confidently where all prefectures are (and how to read them), or knowing the biggest lakes in Japan, or all the national holidays and how they came to be etc. etc.
The issue was that some of the decks that I found that I personally wanted to study did have the content I wanted to learn, but suffered from not having audio, looking really outdated, having a very small font, not the card types I wanted to learn and some of them being full of English and romaji which I didn't want to have on my cards as much as possible.
So, I thought I'd update these decks for my liking and also share it for other people who are interested. 95% of the credit goes to the creators of these decks as well as Forvo which is where I took the audio from. You can read all the adjustments on the Anki pages from the links bellow.
Prefectures and Wards of Tokyo
I mainly put the reading as furigana and ONLY on the back, added Audio and made the font bigger + I recoloured all Tokyo wards to blue because else the risk is high you remember its colour rather than its actual location. Also added reverse cards for both the wards and prefectures. Other than that, I didn't change the theme too much (unlike with the other decks) as it was already quite usable and I liked having the maps here in very big scale. (the deck also teaches flags but I mostly ignored that because I didn't want to study it myself)
Preview:
You can find my version of the deck here: https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/1096284774
National Holidays
Very small deck, it's almost a no-brainer to go through that since it's so quick. I stripped as much of the romaji away as possible and put in the English definition hidden under a button so it's still there for people who want to use it but else it's all in Japanese. It has two card types, one from date to day and from day to the date. Also added audio to all of them as well as removed the questions so it just shows the day or date in front which is cleaner and simpler I think:
You can find my version of the deck here: https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/2090373708
Card preview:
Front + Back (Dark Mode):
Light Mode (With button pressed):
From now on I will just show the dark theme to save some space in this post. Also I will always show the backside and only one card type, so to really see all card types and how it changes from front to back just download the deck and see for yourself.
律令制 (Old provinces of Japan)
Arguably more niche, I won't comment on its usefulness. I added Audio and changed the theme. Also added cards with Japanese word on front and furigana on the back for people like me who are more concerned with learning the province as a word rather than the geographical knowledge, so it now has two card types, map to name and name to reading + map.
Preview:
You can find my version of the deck here: https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/743075778
Lakes of Japan
Arguably really niche. Added Audio to some of the cards (forvo didn't have all of them, which shows how niche it is). Also redid the theme like on the other cards + added card type to learn the reading rather than recognize the lake.
Preview:
You can find my version of the deck here: https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/1477663078
Tokyo Geography
Deck to learn the regions of western Tokyo that are not part of the 23 wards. I completely remade all the maps and added reverse cards as well + changed the theme like with the other cards. Also removed all the romaji and added audio from forvo.
Preview:
You can find my version of the deck here: https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/97349919
Japanese Cities Regional Maps
This deck has subdecks for each prefecture and all the regions/cities within this prefecture; this is a huge deck with over 2300 notes (so 4600+ cards if you study both card types). I don't recommend learning its entirety, but it might be well suited for either: becoming very good at a specific prefecture, for example if you live there and want to know the area better, or the way I use it is I have all cards suspended and once I encounter a certain region in my immersion I will unsuspend and learn its reading and name+location (a bit like sentence mining) so that I get more familiar with more niche place names in Japan (and get a feel for how to guess readings).
I added my personal theme like on the other decks. I also added an audio filed but it's mostly empty Sadly I don't know a good way to add bulk Audio but I just use this addon to quickly add audio for when I unsuspend cards I want to study: https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/858591644
There is some romaji unfortunately which I used as furigana because adding kana to over 2k cards wasn't feasable.
I also added tags for each prefecture in case people want to move all cards into one big deck instead of having it inside subdecks.
Preview:
You can find my version of the deck here: https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/1933280606
Japanese cities with over 100k Residents:
Deck of 264 cities with over 100k Residents. Removed all the romaji and added my personal theme like on the other cards and overhauled the audio which was terrible (audio is a mix from forvo and some accent dictionaries). I found one mistake with one map which I also fixed which honestly was quite lucky (出雲 had a cross in 新潟県 but it should have been in 島根県) so this means this deck might contain more mistakes and I didn't check it thoroughly. I'll definitely be checking it as I go for when I use it so for me it's not an issue, but it might be a deal breaker for other hence why I mention it.
Preview:
You can find my version of the deck here: https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/1641416720
Last remarks
If anyone finds a mistakes in one of these decks or has some feature suggestions or improvements that I could make feel free to let me know (either in the Anki comments or on Reddit).
Enjoy!^^
by AdrixG