This is an all-around deck designed to assist English speakers in learning German.
In my experience, most available decks of this size (5000+ notes) are either algorithm-generated, or constructed by assembling together decks from different sources. As a result, they feel somewhat quirky and inconsistent. This is not the case with this deck. It started from material collected from existing decks, but was then extended and made consistent through a few years of real-world use. Thus, you will find it a bit more structured and organized than usual - or so I hope.
The main features are:
- A mix of pure dictionary items (~2500 nouns, ~1150 verbs, ~850 adjectives/adverbs/other) and German phrases/sentences (~1200).
- Cards have a meaningful order. Common words and simple phrases appear first, less common words and difficult phrases appear later.
- All nouns are shown with their article (plus color-coding), and with their plural form.
- Irregular verbs are shown with their irregular forms.
- Separable verbs have the separable part in bold, so they can be easily recognized.
- The most common combinations of verbs+prepositions are covered in the verb cards.
- The cards will show links pointing to online dictionaries when applicable, to make it easy to investigate words in more detail. I pre-configured links to Wiktionary and WordReference, but these can be easily customized in the card template.
If you plan to start learning German, this is my personal suggestion:
- Buy one of those learn-German-in-30-days booklets or do a similar book-and-CD or online introductory course. This is important to get a sense of the spoken language and to understand the main features of grammar and sentence construction. But of course you will not learn German in 30 days.
- Afterwards (or in parallel) take on this deck to start expanding your vocabulary and increase familiarity with German words and sentences.
- At the same time, work on the theory and do immersion-type activities to get more acquainted with the flow of the spoken language (e.g. German podcasts, German TV). In this respect, other German decks focused on listening to German audio can also be helpful (e.g. https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/1125602705).
If you get to the end of the deck, in my opinion you will then progress more by pure immersion (reading German text, listening to German TV, conversation practice) than by mnemonic techniques.
Note that this deck does not include media files (no audio). Including audio would be of some value, but would also make the deck heavy and difficult to maintain, so it is beyond its scope. A few suggestions:
- If you are interested in the pronunciation of few specific items, usually you can follow the Wiktionary link and find the pronunciation there. Other useful resources are forvo.com and the audio feature of Google translate.
- If you want audio played every time as a reinforcement to help learning, I can suggest this add-on.
I hope this deck can be useful to you.
Update on 2017-02-03: Corrected one error (gender for "die Erde") and various typos. Adjusted descriptions in some cases to avoid ambiguity.
Update on 2017-10-19: A few additional words and minor updates.
Update on 2018-04-17: Minor corrections.
Update on 2018-09-15: Minor correction and one new word.