Anki Shared Decks for Languages

The killer feature of Anki for language learners isn't the algorithm — it's the 25-year archive of community-built shared decks. This page maps the canonical decks per language and the non-AnkiWeb sources you should know about. See Anki Deep Dive for setup, FSRS for the modern scheduler, and Sentence Mining for building your own.

Cross-links: Edu / Anki SRS · Language Learning.

★ ★ Where to find decks

• ★ ★ AnkiWeb shared decks — https://ankiweb.net/shared/decks. The official mass-public catalogue. Quality varies wildly; sort by rating + downloads.
• ★ Refold deck library — Refold-curated frequency decks per language; high quality, modern templates. Free + paid premium versions.
• Migaku shared decks — included with Migaku subscription; immersion-friendly templates.
• AnkiHub — paid; collaborative deck-improvement; mostly medical, growing in language.
• Anki Forge — newer free OSS shared deck site, alternative to AnkiWeb.
• Reddit megathreads — r/Anki, r/LearnJapanese, r/Spanish wiki sidebars list canonical community decks.

★ Japanese — the most-decked language on Earth

• ★ ★ Tango N5 / N4 / N3 / N2 / N1 — sentence-card decks aligned to JLPT levels; gold standard. ~6000 sentences total to N1.
• ★ Core 2k / 6k / 10k — frequency-ordered vocabulary; multiple maintained forks. The modern recommended fork is Kaishi 1.5k (replaces Core 2k as starter).
• ★ JLAB Anime Deck — anime-mined sentence cards; the Refold favourite for input fans.
• JPDB.io — free; not Anki but exports to Anki; tracks vocabulary across novels.
• Refold JP1k — Refold's curated 1000-card starter.
• MIA Japanese deck (legacy MIA / now Migaku) — historical; the predecessor to Refold/Migaku.
• Pitch Accent decks — NHK accent dictionary derived; pair with Migaku Japanese addon or AJT-Pitch-Accent for furigana.

Mandarin

• ★ HSK 1-6 vocabulary decks — the canonical exam-aligned vocab sets; many forks; pick a high-rated one.
• ★ Spoonfed Chinese — sentence-graded by difficulty.
• Mandarin Frequency 5K / 10K — corpus-frequency-ordered.
• Heisig Remembering the Hanzi companion decks.
• Pleco-exported flashcards — Pleco can export your saved word list to Anki .apkg.

Korean

• ★ TTMIK levels 1-9 — Talk To Me In Korean curriculum companion decks.
• Korean Frequency 5K / 6K — corpus-derived.
• Refold 1k Korean.
• Evita's Korean decks — the community standard for advanced.

Spanish

• ★ ★ Spanish Frequency 5K — by Aleksandar Stevanović; the gold-standard Spanish deck; frequency-ordered, sentence cards, audio. The single most-recommended European-language deck.
• Refold 1k Spanish.
• Mexican Spanish / Castilian Spanish dialect-specific forks.
• Dreaming Spanish vocab decks — community-maintained based on Pablo's video series.

French

• ★ French Frequency 5K — same Stevanović project shape; sentence + audio.
• Refold 1k French.
• 2000 French Words by Frequency + 4000 Essential French Words.
• Coffee Break French companion decks.

German

• ★ German Frequency 4K / 5K — Stevanović frequency deck.
• Refold 1k German.
• Goethe A1/A2/B1/B2/C1 vocabulary decks.
• Easy German vocab — community-maintained from the YouTube channel.

Italian / Portuguese

• Italian Frequency 5K (Stevanović).
• Portuguese (Brazilian) Frequency 5K.
• Easy Portuguese / Tá Falado companion decks.

Russian

• ★ Russian Frequency 5K — Stevanović.
• Refold 1k Russian.
• Russian From Scratch companion decks.

Latin / Greek / Classical

• Lingua Latina per se Illustrata companion deck — Hans Ørberg's textbook in flashcard form.
• Wheelock's Latin chapter-by-chapter decks.
• Athenaze Greek companion deck.
• Hebrew Biblical Vocabulary (frequency in OT/NT).
• Sanskrit Devanagari + frequency decks (smaller community).

Less-resourced languages

• Esperanto — surprisingly large Anki community; lernu! companion decks.
• Welsh / Gaelic / Cornish — small but devoted communities.
• Swahili / Yoruba / Hausa — growing.
• Vietnamese / Thai / Indonesian — Refold has decks; quality varies.

★ The Stevanović frequency-deck recipe (the gold standard)

The single most-recommended European-language template, from Aleksandar Stevanović's decks:

• 5000 most-frequent words from a large news+subtitle corpus.
• Each card: target word, IPA, sentence (real source), audio of sentence, image hint (optional).
• Cloze deletion on the target word in the sentence.
• All audio TTS-generated (his early decks) or human (later refinements).

If you find a deck for any other language with this recipe, it's likely high-quality.

How to evaluate a shared deck

1. Card count — 1k-5k for a starter is reasonable; 20k is overwhelming, suspend most.
2. Has audio? — speech is half of language; insist on TTS or human audio.
3. Sentence cards? — words alone are less effective than words-in-sentences.
4. Recently updated? — abandoned decks have broken media URLs.
5. Reviews / rating — sort AnkiWeb by rating ≥ 4 stars + 1000+ downloads.

Suspension strategy

Don't try to learn a 5000-card deck cold. Suspend everything, then unsuspend ~20/day or run AnkiMorphs to sort by "i+1" so each new card has only one unknown word given your existing known-vocabulary set.

Pick this if…

• JP starter: Kaishi 1.5k → Tango N5 → Tango N4 → mine native content.
• Spanish / French / German / Russian / Italian: the relevant Stevanović Frequency 5K.
• Mandarin: HSK level deck matching your goals.
• Korean: TTMIK companion + Refold 1k.
• Latin: Lingua Latina per se Illustrata companion.
• You want to skip shared decks entirely: mine your own from native content with asbplayer — the modern Refold position.