What is the difference between the Foundation and Essential decks besides the way the cards are reviewed?
Ankidrone Essentials consists solely of cards from the JLPT Tango textbooks, maintaining the original order and content. The deck is designed for those who have completed Ankidrone Foundation or wish to expand their vocabulary and supplement sentence mining.
In contrast, Ankidrone Foundation takes the N5 subdeck from Ankidrone Essentials, but the card order is rearranged. We tried to arrange the cards so that each new card is 1T. The sorting algorithm we used prefers cards with the fewest estimated number of unknown words per example sentence and puts them in the beginning of the deck. The deck is intended for complete beginners who only know hiragana and katakana. The JP1K method helps new learners get used to reading words with kanji characters which can initially seem difficult.
Additionally,
many katakana words and place names have been removed from Ankidrone Foundation,
as they are typically unnecessary for learners.
For instance,
words like コンサート are straightforward since they are borrowed from English.
On the other hand,
Ankidrone Essentials includes these terms because they appear in the Tango textbooks.
We also introduced new cards into Ankidrone Foundation when we saw that certain words needed to be learned before others to preserve the 1T order.
If you decide to skip Ankidrone Foundation and jump straight into Ankidrone Essentials, you will need to learn kanji and their readings from the beginning, which can be more challenging compared to following the JP1K method. However, this is a choice some learners prefer. You will also need to suspend or delete any cards you already know, as Ankidrone Essentials retains all content from the Tango textbooks. And since Ankidrone Essentials does not maintain the 1T order as effectively as Ankidrone Foundation, you may encounter more unfamiliar words within sentences. However, it's worth noting that the Foundation deck is not flawless in this regard either.
If you have completed Ankidrone Foundation, skip the Tango N5 subdeck in Ankidrone Essentials, as they cover similar vocabulary, differing mainly in card templates and order.
Tags: faq