Hello everyone! I've been in a lot of trouble lately on figuring out how this Core 2k/6k/10k works... I've been hearing so much good things about it so I'd really like to try it out, but I just don't understand it.

https://ankiweb.net/shared/decks/japanese

So I see all these different decks, but I've been looking mostly at the Core2k/6k Optimized Japanese Vocabulary because I think that one is from NukeMarine ;p. He talks about suspending cards and all of that which makes no sense to me -_-. Anyway when I'm trying out the deck I see the English word with the whole Japanese sentence with Kanji(Furigana). Than I kind of caught on the idea that the parenthesis is the thing your looking for, from the English word.

Now what am I suppose to get out of this core deck. How do I use it exactly? Do I have to comprehend the whole sentence and every single word in it, or just the english word thats given? Also should I add the english word I learned from core and put it into another vocabulary deck for me to learn?

How long is a stick? Longer than the length of a piece of string?

There are many different ways to use the Core series decks.
You can have an English word on the front, with a Japanese sentence and a blank (like nukemarine's deck) where you could produce a suitable word in Japanese for the space.

You can have a Japanese word on the front, along with a Japanese sentence, and could test your understanding of the target word, using the sentence as a contextual guide for meaning, or taking the entire sentence to test your full comprehension of it.

Another way is to have audio playing on the front of the deck and you could test your understanding of what you've heard; be it in producing a translation, writing out what you heard and referring to the sentence written on the back of the card to see how you went, etc.

There seems to be two primary schools of thought in respect to using the Core decks: production and recognition. It might be useful to do a forum search on the terms, as there has been, over the course of years, rather a lot of opinion over the matter. Some more reading on the subject might benefit you, to gain some more sense on the matter.


Ultimately, though, as an autodidact, you'll end up finding out one way or another the better approaches to how you learn.

There are also a lot of ways to study it without Anki. You can get text files for the Core 6000 data from http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?tid=9762 or https://sites.google.com/site/ankinihongo/home/kore.

I reviewed the sentences by reading them with translations and without furigana while listening to the audio files. I also printed vocabulary items on paper, and I reviewed two kanji compounds by using HTML files where one of the two kanji and hiragana are initially hidden but shown on mouseover.

Uisukii answers the question pretty well I think. Also as far as this forum and core2k/6k is concerned,

uisukii Wrote:There seems to be two primary schools of thought in respect to using the Core decks: production and recognition. It might be useful to do a forum search on the terms, as there has been, over the course of years, rather a lot of opinion over the matter. Some more reading on the subject might benefit you, to gain some more sense on the matter.

Given that threads keep getting created for core2k/6k questions, oftentimes already answered in other threads, perhaps it would be better to create a dedicated thread for questions regarding it, and/or a FAQ in the same thread.

That way less time can be spent on making core-question threads and more time spent on how to stay motivated threads, of which we desperately need more.

^I'm with you. A dedicated "Core 2/6/10 Thousand" thread would be pretty cool. The opening post could also contain a collection of all previous Core threads, to help people who aren't sure how to (or might not think to) use the Search function. Though it would mean that someone (a mod, I guess) would have to set it up and keep it in order.