About three weeks ago, I was browsing shared decks on Anki when I stumbled upon this: https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/1407096987
"Full Japanese Study Deck" the author said, 50K NOTES, kana, grammar, JLPT, ALL kanji — basically, everything. I had to check out this potential goldmine for myself. So I downloaded it and started digging into it.
And wow. This is, hands down, the most organized deck I’ve ever seen in my Japanese learning journey. I'm not the only one who thinks this (look at the ratings). Most decks either have too few notes but are well-structured, or they have a ton of content but are a mess. Not this one. Every subdeck is clearly labeled, and all cards are tagged. You can filter by archaic words, specific fields like astronomy or biology — whatever you need.
A quick review:
Organization: 10/10 – Every card and subdeck is structured perfectly.
Content: 9/10 – Massive vocabulary + solid grammar coverage.
Design: 9/10 – Clean but functional, with helpful features like audio, furigana, and kanji stroke order.
Usability: 9/10 – Easy to navigate and use.
Extras: 8/10 – A GitHub repo where you can report issues or contribute.
Overall rating: 9/10
I’ve been using this deck for only three weeks, but I’ve already learned at least 30% more than what I knew before in terms of vocab, kanji, grammar and overall understanding of the language.
I honestly think this deck deserves way more attention. The creator has put in unbelievable effort, and if you're serious about Japanese, you should give it a shot. Let me know your opinion! How would you compare this deck to others?
by Smooth_Grass9178
3 comments
Looking good, I will give it a try. Thank you OP
Hello, I’m new to anki. How exactly do i access this? I downloaded it but i cant seem to open the file
This is a really cool deck in theory and the work put into it is impressive and hats off to the creator. However lol, I don’t mind playing the contrarian here.
I think a mega deck like this has *a lot* drawbacks. To quote the “I Think You Should Leave with Tim Robinson” prank show sketch, “There’s too much fucking shit on me”
What does it say that there are people who follow the Moe Way method and use a core 2k deck, read through Genki/Tae Kim/Quartet/etc., and then immerse+sentence mine, carefully crafting their own personal anki deck accumulating 10k-15k words and then passing the N1?
This deck has more than 50000 cards. Studying 30 cards a day, every day, it will take you 4.5 years to just look at each card **once**.
Take for instance the Kana section
>This subdeck has the (142) basic and (230) extended hiragana and katakana characters and their reading, including audio for each kana.
When I started I crammed all the kana in 2 weeks, opened Genki, and never looked back. Studying Genki solidified all the kana. There’s no point in “reviewing” kana months later in an anki deck. And what do you mean you should learn the 230 extended kana??
There are kana combinations that only exist in an almost hypothetical sense (ヴィェ) or are straight up obsolete lol (see ヰ）
And then this part is egregious to me,
>All CJK kanji
>This subdeck encompasses 9359 (used in Japanese) CJK kanji, along with 26300 common words using each kanji.
>You can filter by archaic words, specific fields like astronomy or biology — whatever you need.
Why?? lol What is the purpose of this?
I’m gonna be real with you, you’re not gonna be good at Japanese just because you know the word 腎細胞癌 in isolation. Learning 26000 words with no sense of direction is a waste of time lol. The amount of time you spend trying to go through the deck would be waaaay better spent just doing it on your own collecting words from books you actually wanted to read.
I can see this deck useful for the grammar terms/JLPT kanji+vocab, which cuts it down to 10026 cards. But then I’d still say, use it for everything up to N3, and then move on to making your own deck while immersing.
Again, I’m impressed by the deck author, but I don’t know who’s the audience for this deck. If it’s for total beginners, they’ll eventually outgrow it because they’ll come to the conclusions I’ve laid out here, there’s so much fluff and no direction. There’s a tipping point where you’d want to just read and make your own deck.
Sorry for being cynical lol. I see the appeal of a “one anki deck to rule them all” for Japanese, but I don’t know how long one would actually stick with it past learning the JLPT kanji/vocab and some of the grammar.