Hello

I’m curios what Anki decks you are using from the public available ones besides the ones from textfugu.

First, I tried out all the different Kana decks to find one or two or three which I would work with more than twice and be sick and tired of them afterwards ;-)
Actually, I picked the textfugu decks, since I liked them most.
Some Kana decks used weird fonts, which I had problems to recognize the characters. Well, at that time, I had no idea how to change the font…
Eventually, I’m still using Extended Kana once in a while to repeat the Katakana part especially.

Later on, I tried out like 30 differnt Japanese Kanji and vocabulary decks. I found out, that lot’s of decks are available like 3 or 4 times (e.g. Kanjidamage) using different names and others I just disliked, because they contained only front and back and didn’t seem very helpful to me.
In the meantime the decks were fruitful and multiplied…
Too often the descriptions are neither informative nor complete, thus it is difficult, to find a suitable deck without looking at all of them.

It is getting harder to find the Anki deck “treasures”.
That’s actually, why I’m writing.
Thus, at this occasion, I also might  get some new ideas, what I could add or look for, in order to be able to learn the words more easily. I tend to forget things very quickly, which I cannot connect to something familiar, like Japanese words. I bet, I’m not the only one ;-)

Which public available Kanji and vocabulary deck do you use or have you used?
What do you like about the deck and what changes have you applied?
Or are you doing your deck from scratch all by yourself?
What plugins have you installed?
And of course, what is your level of Japanese?

So far, I can read Hiragana and Katakana and I know a handful of Kanji (I use them to cheat on Kana vocabulary, actually ;))
I’m doing very basic stuff, just started Season 2 of Textfugu and I practice some reading (link -> weather deck).
Sometimes I like to learn specialized vocabulary like numbers or the weather stuff (i’ll continue doing it until I’ll understand it and it’ll sound Japanese with not much accent!)
I also started to decode easy Japanese texts after the Birkenbihl* method.

Anki decks I use on a regular basis at the moment

• Powerkurs für Anfänger Japanisch PONS (Japanese – German)
  I use this language book to learn Japanese besides textfugu.
  Recently, I started to update the deck quite a lot with sentences out of the book.
  Has no sound.
• Japanisch im Sauseschritt (Japanese – German)
  Another German language coures similar to Pons, uses even a similar vocabulary.
  Contains sounds to most of the words, that’s actually, why I use it.
• Heisig die Kanji lernen und behalten (Japanese – English – German)
  Contains this neat stroke diagram from kanjicafe.com
  After adding more reading examples to the Kanji, putting the on- and kun-yomi in separate fields, I tag them in order that they get into my learning list.
  English users just could revert it to English. Not all words are translated yet.
• Japanese weather pack be chev
  I changed the card layout, since my primary goal is to study the words and not the Kanjis.
  Thus Kanji + Kana are on the front now, English is on the back.
  At the moment I’m adding vocabulary from the weekly weather reports of http://www.coscom.co.jp/newsweather
  It’s kind of neat to be able to read the weather report in Kana or Kanji. Even vocabulary is available and the report is spoken :-)

The decks I use once in a while

• Extended Kana
  It contains: sounds, stroke order pictures well as always Hiragana and Katakana.
  It either shows Hiragana, Katakana, Romanji or plays sound.
  There is also the information for three Romanji writing systems available: hepburn, kunrei, nippon-shiki.
• Basic Numbers (japanese)
  Straight forward learning all those numbers.
  It contains some sounds and just numbers.
• Japanese Numbers
  Contains numbers, minutes, hours, years.
  Good deck to get the basics.
  No sound.
• Japanese Dates Time
  Straight forward learning Dates and Times.
  Japanes Numbers and Basic Numbers are a good preparation for this deck.
• Japanese Radical Names improved
  It asks to find the radicals in Kanjis, I like this approach.
• Japanese corePlus
  That’s definitiely my favorite deck concerning the information it contains for each word.
  Sounds mostly included, but it’s huge, anki backup is 220 MBytes!
  That’s for when I’m more advanced in Japanese.

Anki Plugins I have installed

• Japanese Support (of couse :-))
• xxfurigana
• Kanji_info (needs the stroke order font and put all Kanjis in the strok-order-font at the bottom of the answer, details see in the info)
• Tatoeba Japanese (shows sample sentences from tatoeba project)
• Wadoku Saiga Forvo lookup (for German-Japanese dictionary)
• example sentences (searches in Taka Corpus, needs special layout to work)
• Kanji_meanings (has special layout requirements to work)
• Kanji_words (searches in JLTP Vocabulary, needs special layout to work)
• yomichan (a Rikaichan-style dictionary application)

Thanks

*for more details how the Birkenbihl method works, there is a pdf available at http://www.birkenbihl.de/PDF/MethodEnglish.pdf
Another PDF, it’s more a scientific approach of her method is available at http://www.shitennoji.ac.jp/ibu/images/toshokan/kiyo2005w-18johann.pdf
She was German and published books mostly about learning and how the brain is working while learning. If you want to read them, you probably have to learn German first ;-)
Sadly, she died a month ago at the age of 65.