"What's the best Anki deck for Japanese?" is one of the most-asked questions in every learning community, and it gets asked again every few weeks — which tells you something. There is no single obvious answer, and the search itself eats time you could have spent learning words.
Here is the short version of the landscape — including the option most of these threads never mention, which is not using a deck at all.
Your actual options
Cotobara — the no-deck option, and our recommendation. Everything a good deck gives you, already assembled and maintained: a curated JLPT- and frequency-ordered corpus, level-appropriate example sentences with natural-sounding audio, a review engine that's already tuned, and no file to import, vet, or configure. It's free to start and you're reviewing real Japanese about a minute after signing up — versus an evening of deck-shopping for the alternatives below. More on how it differs from an Anki setup below, and in Cotobara vs Anki.
Kaishi 1.5k. The usual community recommendation for beginners. Around 1,500 high-frequency words, one clean card per word, audio and example sentences included, actively maintained. The best of the shared decks — but it still lands in your lap as a file with settings you're expected to tune, and it runs dry at 1,500 words with no defined next step.
Core 2k/6k. The old standard. Frequency-ordered vocabulary from newspaper corpora, with sentence audio. Still usable, but the card formatting is dated, versions have forked in confusing ways, and some of the frequency ordering reflects written news Japanese rather than what you will meet first.
JLPT level decks (N5–N1). Handy if you have an exam date. Quality varies enormously between uploads — readings and glosses are often wrong, and the "official" JLPT vocabulary lists these decks claim to follow have not been published since 2010. This is the category where a curated corpus is worth the most, because a wrong reading you drill for six months is expensive.
Mining decks (Yomitan/Yomichan + a sentence miner). The best long-term setup, and the most work. You read or watch real Japanese and make cards from words you actually met. Excellent once you are intermediate; not a starting point — you need a few thousand words before mining beats a curated list.
The part the recommendations skip
Whichever deck you pick, you inherit the same jobs:
- Vetting it. Shared decks contain wrong readings, missing audio, and glosses that are technically correct and practically misleading. You will not catch these as a beginner — that's the problem.
- Configuring it. New cards per day, review limits, leech thresholds, FSRS settings, which note fields show on which side. Every one of these has a wrong answer that quietly wastes months.
- Maintaining it. Add-ons break on updates, sync needs setting up, formatting drifts, and the deck eventually runs out.
- Deciding what's next. When the 1.5k is done, you are back where you started, searching forums again.
That's not an argument against Anki. Anki is genuinely excellent and people pass N1 with it. It's an argument about where your first month goes. The most common failure isn't picking the wrong deck — it's spending three evenings comparing decks, importing one, tweaking settings, and never building the daily habit.
Or: skip the deck entirely
Cotobara is what an already-vetted, already-configured Japanese vocabulary deck looks like when it stops being a file you have to manage:
- Curated, JLPT-organized vocabulary by level and frequency — no version forks, no dead uploads, no wondering whether the list is current.
- Level-appropriate example sentences on every word — written for the level the word belongs to rather than scraped from a news corpus — with natural-sounding audio, furigana you can switch off, and experimental hover-to-translate glossing.
- A recall-focused review engine that's already tuned — every word comes back as both a recognition and a production card, and there are no leech thresholds or interval multipliers to guess at.
- Mistake review and visible progress by level and exam-readiness, instead of a card counter.
- WaniKani import, free on every account, so anything you have already burned doesn't come back as a review.
No deck to evaluate, no scheduling settings to research, no maintenance. You sign up and you are reviewing real Japanese in about a minute.
On cost: the free plan gives you 3 new words a day with unlimited reviews — about 1,000 words a year, which is a real JLPT level — and Premium raises the daily new-word limit to 100 and adds word breakdowns, notes and bookmarks. Every new account starts with 30 days of Premium, no card required. Anki is free without a word limit, and that is a genuine point in its favour; what you pay for it is the evening of setup and the ongoing maintenance described above.
Which should you pick?
- Most people should start with Cotobara. If your goal is to know more Japanese rather than to own a study system, the curation, sentences, audio, and scheduling are already done — and it's free to try, so the comparison costs you a minute rather than an evening.
- Choose Anki + Kaishi 1.5k if you specifically want to build and control your own system: custom card templates, your own algorithm settings, offline data you own forever.
Either way, the thing you start this week beats the perfect deck you are still researching next month. For the longer side-by-side, see Cotobara vs Anki.
Start for free — no deck hunting, no setup, first review in under a minute.