Vocabulary deck
Added 2024-01-05 13:20:31 +0000 UTCI just finished the vocab deck you had voted for, the download link is in this post: https://www.patreon.com/posts/vocabulary-deck-95915372
The deck teaches the ~500 most important words of the beginner's course in isolation. The front of the card has audio and the Japanese word, the back has the English translation.
In a nutshell, the vocab deck lowers the information density of the main deck by teaching words in advance. Use it to learn some words ahead of time, then switch to the main deck. This will then add grammar and repeat the words in full sentences. Note that you do not HAVE to use this. The only "new" information inside the vocab deck is the voiced dictionary form of the Japanese word.
Some details on the audio:
Without audio, the deck would be useless. For my own studies, I had used the pronunciation dictionary forvo.com together with a spaced repetition system. Forvo's licensing however is prohibitive and the audio quality is often pretty bad. Therefore, I had tried to generate the audio with text-to-speech tools instead. After trying a few (google cloud, narakeet, speechify, murf and elevenlabs), I finally decided to hire a professional voice actress. The result is great!
Edit: If you want to change the cards to English -> Japanese, have a look at the faq page (bottom). This page is not yet completed and not officially linked, but I started to add answers to common questions there:
https://www.japanese-like-a-breeze.com/faq/
Comments
Thanks for your incredible work!!
Lorenz
2025-06-14 18:59:28 +0000 UTCJust subbed to say thank you for your hard work. I've been doing the beginner deck for a couple of months now and it's really helping me understand more! Thank you
Toast
2024-06-26 17:37:00 +0000 UTCHi I've recently finished the beginner Vocabulary deck. It's super useful!! Just curious if you are planning to make something similar for intermediate deck or expand the beginner one. Really appreciate your work. Thank you!
Irving Chen
2024-03-09 15:40:16 +0000 UTCIf you save after swapping the front to the back template (and vice versa), it should affect the whole deck (I recently made a change to my deck that put the image on the back instead of the front). Hmm, duplicating a deck isnt something I've done, and I actually had difficulty doing this myself. You might try this addon: https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/1779572689
Hannah Novotny
2024-02-24 05:47:09 +0000 UTCHannah, you are a gem, thank you very much. Is there a way to do it with all the cards at once? Also, how do I save the changes into a new deck (since I want to keep the original deck)?
Bon Ami
2024-02-23 09:26:33 +0000 UTCIt's not too hard! -In the PC Anki app, select "Browse" at the top then find the Jlab deck on the left hand side, and select it under "Decks". Next, open up the notepad app on your computer. After you've done that, in the listed cards in the Jlab deck, select one of the Listening or Reading cards who's format you want to change and go to the upper right hand side in Anki where it says "Cards" in between Fields and Preview. Select that and it will bring up the window to edit the front and back of the card layout. First thing, copy and past both the front and back of the card Templates into notepad (you can separate them with some dashes or extra lines if you like). Once you've done that, its as easy as copy-pasting the Front Template text into the back Template, and vice versa. You should be able to preview before saving. Be sure to save the notepad file just in case if you want to continue editing/experimenting beyond that, just so you have the original scripts. :)
Hannah Novotny
2024-02-21 04:32:10 +0000 UTCHave you had the time to think about my request?
Bon Ami
2024-02-16 09:03:36 +0000 UTCGood to read that! I can also confirm the problem of remembering a word only in the sentence it was originally learned from. Therefore I had mined multiple, different sentences per word myself. This was also the motivation of adding multiple sentences for a new word to the intermediate deck, I hope that helps a bit to get over this....
Joe
2024-01-26 19:12:50 +0000 UTCBefore this was released I had some significant doubts about how useful it would really be for me. I'm near the end of intermediate deck 1, so I've long since covered all of this vocab. But it ended up being a good review of some of the words I didn't properly know, and only remembered in the specific context of the sentences they had been presented in. I do definitely prefer to first learn things through sentences, but having vocab isolation afterwards to reinforce it is real nice.
Sam Samson
2024-01-25 02:30:17 +0000 UTCI'm sorry I could not even switch from J-E to E-J. I go to the first Jlab-ListeningCard and press "Cards", then select "Back Template". But then what? You made a rectangle highlighting the word "furigana"? I'm sorry, I'm very useless when it comes to Anki. If possible, please provide the vocab deck, I'd be very grateful. Or a video detailing the process, that would be even better.
Bon Ami
2024-01-16 20:07:12 +0000 UTCAnki is pretty complex and for power users in my opinion.... Could you at least switch from J-E to E-J? I'll check if I can provide another version of the vocab deck...
Joe
2024-01-15 18:58:50 +0000 UTCThanks. This seems exactly what I was looking for. Unfortunately I'm useless when it comes to dealing with the backend of Anki, so I'm afraid that creating new cards based on the existing deck overwhelms me.
Bon Ami
2024-01-13 08:37:06 +0000 UTCThis is possible and it's a good idea to ask this here. I added this to the FAQ page I recently started (last item): https://www.japanese-like-a-breeze.com/faq/
Joe
2024-01-09 14:03:18 +0000 UTCSorry if this is the wrong place to ask but would it be possible to modify the decks so that one side has the english sentence and the other side the translation (with furigana etc.)? The reason is that I would like to learn the translations by heart.
Bon Ami
2024-01-07 11:40:18 +0000 UTCNice. I think that it will be great for a complete beginner, especially if done at the same time as the regular course. The audio is nice.
stephen fuqua
2024-01-05 15:02:57 +0000 UTC
