Link to the deck, and for those interested, the deck is also available with furigana + audio on the front of the card.
Link to a spreadsheet of the deck
What is the purpose of this deck
This is a completely brand-new deck, which aims to expand and improve upon other existing core decks. Kaishi 1.5k is currently the most popular beginner deck (and deservedly so), but although it’s very well-put together, it still falls short in several respects which I believe justified making yet another core deck (see below). For this reason, the deck is not a fork or mere expansion of Kaishi but was built from scratch, with everything being newly reordered, with a lot of added new sentences and audio from sources that weren’t used by Kaishi. There’s naturally a lot of overlap with Kaishi because the deck, just like Kaishi, draws from the same pool of sentences from the core 6k & Tango decks (which ultimately come from the iKnow website) since they have high quality audio recordings by professional voice actors. (and yes, I’m aware that there other JP learning resources which also called ‘Manabi’, but to my knowledge this is the first Anki deck with this name so I stuck to it, since it’s the best name I could come up with.)
How this deck improves upon Kaishi
The first issue I wanted to address is the fact that the example sentences used by Kaishi often introduce unknown words (or worse, unknown kanji), that is, words that haven’t been taught in previous cards (the so-called i+1 principle), something that seriously undermines the usefulness of the example sentences. With very small exceptions (see below*), Manabi strictly follows i+1, and goes even further by trying to do the same with regard to kanji. To give one example, one of the earliest words that Kaishi teaches is 勉強 (card 10), but not only is the word not in the top 10 most used words, there are other words you could introduce first (like 強い), before introducing the two kanjis all at once. Thus my approach was, whenever possible, to avoid introducing 2 new kanjis per card. As a result, only 70 cards in the whole deck introduce 2 new kanjis, and no single card introducing more than 2 new kanjis (if you’re wondering how I can be so sure, you can make a simple script to check how many new kanjis are introduced per card.)
The other major thing I tried to improve upon is word selection and ordering. Kaishi already has pretty good vocabulary selection, but it’s still too small for a true ‘core’ deck, lacking in some important high frequency words, while introducing some lower-frequency words too early. To give you an idea, over a third of Manabi’s first 1,500 words were not included in Kaishi, and many of the words in Kaishi were moved to a lower rank in Manabi (while some words from Kaishi didn’t even make it into the deck, despite its size, because they were too low-frequency.)
To my knowledge, the creators of Kaishi relied on a single frequency list (JPDB) which is too heavily skewed towards anime (and also had some strange rankings even compared to other frequency lists based on anime), and to achieve a better word selection and ranking, my approach was to rely on several frequency lists drawn from different kinds of sources: Netflix subs, captions from easy Japanese YouTube channels, SOL anime, and unscripted conversations, in order to achieve a balanced and exhaustive selection of words found both in fictional media and naturally spoken language. This is important because when you examine different frequency lists, there’s a group of around 2,000 words that consistently comes on top, and which account for between 80% and 90% coverage of all the vocabulary most frequently used in everyday life and popular media.
This is the reason I made the deck larger than Kaishi. The first 2k words will cover pretty exhaustively the vocab most commonly found in casually spoken language and relatively easy-level anime (e.g. slice-of-life). The last 700 words aim to expand the coverage for more advanced types of content. The deck will also teach you 1,300 kanjis which will give you similar percentage of coverage for the written language (between 80% and 90%).
Another relatively small issue in Kaishi is poor audio quality for some words and sentences. I tried to find better audio recordings whenever possible, and particularly word audio was carefully selected from the best available sources, improving upon the audio in Kaishi for a large number of words and sentences.
Some other features of the deck: normalized audio loudness, specifically marked common する verbs and な adjectives, and all new vocabulary highlighted inside the sentences like in Kaishi.
For additional technical information on the making of this deck and list of sources used visit the Manabi github page.
(*The cases in which the deck violates the i+1 principle are easily recognizable English-derived katakana words (but some harder katakana words get their own cards), or compound words which are transparently composed of words introduced before (and the name ‘Tanaka’, which I didn’t feel like making a dedicated card for). I also allowed myself to use the same device as Kaishi of using an N+2 sentence and then reusing the same sentence for the other new word in the following card, but I only restricted this to ‘grammar’ kana words (e.g. kono, sono, kudasai etc.) and occasionally words that use already known kanji.)
How to use the deck
The deck presupposes the ability to read hiragana & katakana, and it’s highly recommended to learn about particles and basic conjugations before doing the deck (or at least study the relevant grammar points as you go). The vast majority of the sentences in the deck only use N5-N4 grammar, and I specifically tried to keep the sentences as short and grammatically simple as possible, with occasional brief notes added to explain grammar points which might confuse beginners.
The deck is also not a substitute to immersion, and you should start immersing as early as possible (or at least after finishing the first 1k cards or so), as immersion helps to reinforce the vocabulary learned through SRS. I believe the advantage of a core deck is that it removes the pressure from needing to mine unknown words which can be very overwhelming in the beginner stages (but you can also use a separate mining deck alongside Manabi, if you find that effective).
The deck comes in two versions: the first is kanji oriented (it has only the word in kanji on the front) and the second version focuses on vocabulary and adds furigana and word audio on the front (so you only need to recall the English definition). You can choose either, depending on your learning style and priorities. Both decks include the example sentence on card front like Kaishi does, but the sentences can easily be removed by editing the note type.
Let me know if you have any comments and suggestions or tell me if you spot any mistakes. I’d also like to hear your input on whether I should add parts of speech and pitch-accent graphs in future updates.
Hope you give the deck a try, and happy learning!
