Best Anki deck for N4? Sharing mine.

flashcard_life

My Optimized N4 Anki Setup (with stats)

I've been iterating on this for about four months and I'm happy enough with the numbers to share. Current retention rate: 91.3% on mature cards. Here's the full config.

Deck structure

I run three separate decks rather than one combined deck:

N4-Vocab — 1,700 cards (core vocabulary + context sentences)
N4-Kanji — 320 cards (kanji recognition + reading)
N4-Grammar — 180 cards (grammar pattern → example sentence, cloze format)

Keeping them separate lets me weight reviews differently and track where my retention is actually dropping.

Interval settings

Setting	Value	Notes
New cards/day	15	Split ₈ vocab / 5 kanji / 2 grammar
Starting ease	250%	Slightly above default
Interval modifier	105%	Conservative — I'd rather review more
Maximum interval	180 days	Caps at ₆ months
New interval (lapse)	20%	Don't reset fully on fail
Lapse threshold	8	Card becomes leech after 8 fails

Review schedule

Morning session: 20–30 minutes before anything else (willpower is highest, interference from new input is lowest).

Average daily reviews: 87 cards. Sounds like a lot but it plateaus once you've built the deck up — mature cards come back slowly.

Card format (vocab cards)

Front: Japanese word (kanji + kana)
Back:

Reading
English meaning
Example sentence (Japanese)
Example sentence (English)
JLPT level tag

I don't put audio on the front. Some people do — I find it creates a listening-only pathway that doesn't transfer to reading recognition.

Stats after 4 months

Total cards: 2,147 active
Mature cards (interval >21 days): 1,489
Retention on mature cards: 91.3%
Average time per card: 6.2 seconds
Total review time this month: 41 hours

One thing I'd change

I started too many new cards in the first month and built up a review backlog that took six weeks to clear. If you're starting from zero, cap yourself at 10 new cards/day for the first month no matter how tempted you are to go faster.

Happy to answer questions about the setup.

coffeeandkanji

Solid setup. The stats look healthy — 91.3% on mature is right in the target range.

One thing I would tweak: your lapse new interval at 20% might be too generous for grammar cards specifically. When I fail a grammar pattern, I want it back in 3–4 days, not 20% of whatever the previous interval was (which could be months). I override this per-deck: grammar lapses reset to a fixed 3-day interval, vocab stays at percentage-based.

The reasoning: vocabulary failure is usually retrieval timing. Grammar failure is usually conceptual — you need to re-encounter it more deliberately, not just sooner.

spreadsheet_sensei

Great post. I track all my Anki statistics in a spreadsheet — daily review counts, retention by deck, new card intake rate, estimated time to clear queue. It lets me spot drift before it becomes a backlog problem.

Happy to share the template if anyone wants it. It's set up to pull from Anki's stats export so you're not entering anything manually. Just drop a CSV in and the charts update automatically.

Also: your point about starting too many new cards is the most important thing in this post. I see people blow up their review schedule in week two every time.

runningstart

Muy útil todo esto. Una pregunta práctica — ¿alguien tiene un mazo así pero con las definiciones en español? Los que encuentro en español suelen ser bastante básicos o están mal hechos. Llevo estudiando con definiciones en inglés pero siento que hay una capa extra de traducción que me ralentiza.

Si no existe lo haré yo, pero antes de ponerme a eso prefiero saber si ya hay algo bueno por ahí.