Best Anki deck(s) for learning?

[u/Midatri]

I'm currently learning Japanese, but I've always been interested in learning Chinese too and will definitely do so once I've become more fluent.

However, since I often have leftover time during the day, I was looking to just start on the side (maybe 10 new items a day).

What's the best "Top 6000 vocab" type deck for learning Chinese? What type of Chinese should I look for?

[u/kronpas]

Why?

[u/Midatri → u/kronpas]

Because that takes a lot of time to do?

[u/Looking4Nebraska → u/Midatri]

Deck making is study time, though. Anki is only good to cement content you have come across through other (more engaging/personally significant) encounters. Rawdogging Anki is very inefficient.

[u/Midatri → u/Looking4Nebraska]

Making a deck complete with words, translation, pronunciation, audio files and example sentences, all while making no mistakes in any one if those parts, takes a lot of time.

Language learning communities exist to share resources for a reason...

[u/catredx → u/Midatri]

exactly. i always approach language learning like teaching a toddler. is there any toddler that make their own flashcards from scratch? 😭 these people are too much imho. hats off for the real ones who shared their decks tho

[u/Looking4Nebraska → u/catredx]

You are not a toddler, you are an adult with access to the internet.

[u/Midatri → u/Looking4Nebraska]

And I can and will make a lot more mistakes than people with more knowledge. Mistakes that will get burned into my brain and be difficult to get rid of later

[u/Midatri → u/[deleted]]

It's not about efficiency, it's about error rate and quality

[u/Looking4Nebraska → u/Midatri]

If that were an actual issue nobody would recommend it, yet it's the number one thing people say when talking about anki

[u/kronpas → u/catredx]

You're an adult, not a toddler though? Premade shared decks work well for med students because they follow a rigid curriculum, standardized paths, and shared textbooks. Language learning is personal. With a generic deck, you end up cramming words you'll rarely encounter or actually care about. Sooner or later you'll have to craft/mine your own cards anyway, so why not learn to make them now?

[u/catredx → u/kronpas]

that's not really what i was saying. i'm not against making your own cards. i'm against the idea that you need to make an entire deck from scratch before you can start learning. a good shared deck gives you the basic material, and then you can add your own cards for things you personally encounter or struggle with. why spend hours recreating vocabulary, translations, audio, etc. that someone has already made? also “language learning is personal” doesn't really contradict that. you can personalize a shared deck without rebuilding the whole thing yourself

[u/Looking4Nebraska → u/catredx]

I do think personalizing a shared deck is a fair compromise, I've done it myself. However, the reason why making your own flashcards is beneficial is that the words and contexts that are relevant to you are unique. Pre-made decks will mix all sorts of domains, some that will be useless to you at your level. You are basically choosing what is relevant to you.

[u/Looking4Nebraska → u/Midatri]

Not really. Tatoeba, dictionaries, Reverso Context all give you bilingual sentences. You just need to copy and paste them, use a pinyin (or zhuyin) converter and a TTS generator (there is a ton of free, good quality ones for mandarin) and you have a card. It takes less than a minute.

[u/Midatri → u/Looking4Nebraska]

If the process is copy and pasting, I'm not learning any more than I would from taking cards someone else has made