Genki Vocabulary: Three Honest Ways to Turn 1,700 Words into Cards

Genki vocabulary is the word list that fronts every lesson of GENKI: An Integrated Course in Elementary Japanese — the two-volume elementary textbook from The Japan Times whose official site carries the tagline "More than 3.5 million series copies sold." The series runs 23 lessons: Vol. 1 holds Lessons 1–12 and lands, by the publisher's own placement, at JLPT N5; Vol. 2 holds Lessons 13–23 and aims at N4. The total is fixed and knowable before you start: approximately 1,700 basic words, which averages to about 74 per lesson.

Turning that list into scheduled flashcards has three honest routes — download a premade Anki deck, build your own in Anki, or paste each chapter's list into a zero-setup tool and confirm AI-ranked candidates. All three work. They differ in who pays the setup cost and how much of the deck is actually yours, not in whether the scheduling is sound. This post walks each rung with the real numbers.

Disclosure up front: I build Piccard, the third rung on this ladder. The first two are still what I'd tell a class-paced friend to weigh seriously, and I'll flag exactly where each one wins.

What exactly counts as Genki vocabulary?

The vocabulary section that opens each lesson's Dialogue and Grammar part, plus the dictionary-style index in each volume's back matter. The publisher puts a number on it:

> Vocabulary: Approximately 1700 basic words are covered. — What is GENKI?, Genki-Online (The Japan Times)

Four numbers worth internalizing:

• **23 lessons** — so ~1,700 words averages to ~74 new words per lesson (that's arithmetic, not an official figure; early chapters run lighter, late ones heavier).
• **317 kanji** ride along in the Reading and Writing sections.
• The publisher's own estimate for finishing all 23 lessons is about 200 hours (Genki Online).
• Lesson order, not frequency order, governs everything. Your class quizzes Lesson 5's travel words (沖縄旅行 — "A Trip to Okinawa") whether or not they're high-frequency, because that's the chapter you're on.

That last point is why Genki deck searches split off from starter-deck searches. Kaishi 1.5k orders the language by frequency (we've written it up here); Genki orders it by curriculum, and if you're in a course you need the curriculum's order to keep pace.

One edition footnote before the deck links: the series revised to a third edition, and the deck ecosystem still straddles both. A second-edition deck misses whatever the revision shuffled between lessons.

Is there a ready-made Genki deck you can just download?

Yes — and two on AnkiWeb are worth naming by ID, because titles drift and search results mix editions.

The whole-series deck. Genki Japanese Vocabulary:

> This deck contains all the vocabulary from the Genki textbook series with example sentences, audio, and a pitch accent guide. — AnkiWeb listing

The per-volume decks. Genki 1 3rd edition with sound files (updated) is exactly its title: third edition, Vol. 1, native audio on the entries — the Anki Decks mirror counts 1,076 notes and 778 audio clips — with a sibling Genki 2 deck covering Lessons 13–23. If you want your deck's structure to mirror your textbook's pagination lesson by lesson, this is the shape that does it.

The community classic. The deck Reddit long called the only good Genki vocabulary deck dates from 2016 and is upfront about its scope:

> It contains every word/word phrase that is listed under the vocab sections of every 2nd Edition Genki I+II lesson, in addition to a few bonus ones that were listed at the end of each chapter.

Second edition. A fine deck with the wrong decade's pagination.

One structural caveat nobody prints on a download page: these are community copies of a copyrighted list, and the publisher enforces. Genki Study Resources, a widely used free companion site, had a popular Anki-decks download page that now shows only:

> This page has been taken down at the request of The Japan Times. — Genki Study Resources

The premade rung is the fastest: free, ten minutes, your first review happens tonight. What you accept is someone else's card design, someone else's edition, and links that can rot without notice.

Should you build your own deck in Anki instead?

The old hands on r/LearnJapanese say yes, and they have a point:

> Ideally, you should make your own Genki deck. It helps with recall and would be custom made to your tastes. — "What is the best Anki deck for Genki?"

Typing a word is itself a rehearsal, and the finished deck fits your memory's edges instead of someone's average. Anki deserves the respect it gets here: free, syncs everywhere, and modern Anki ships the same FSRS scheduler family that any credible current tool uses. The disagreement was never about the scheduling engine.

Run the honest arithmetic before committing. 1,700 entries at four fields each — word, reading, meaning, example — call it 30 seconds an entry once you're quick, is about 14 hours of data entry before your first review. Then comes the configuration surface: note types, field mapping, new-card limits, FSRS parameters you can set wrong. A hand-built Genki deck is the best-fitting Genki deck in existence, and it costs roughly two full course-days of your life to bootstrap. Worth it for some people. Not a morality test.

What does pasting a chapter into Piccard actually look like?

A ranked checklist of candidate words, confirmed in capped batches, not 74 instant cards. The third rung is my product, so read this walkthrough as an owner's demo.

The paste route. Open the vocabulary list of, say, Lesson 8 (バーベキュー, "Barbecue"), select it, paste it in. What comes back is not 74 instant cards. It's a ranked checklist: every candidate word tagged high, medium, or low for how much it deserves your review time, the high-value ones pre-selected, with select-all one click away if you disagree with the ranking. A chapter-sized paste proposes its strongest two dozen or so per round — a whole-volume import is mined in sections and tops out near a hundred — and one confirm creates up to 40 cards. A ~74-word lesson therefore clears in a single pass; kept in full, the 1,700-word series comes to about 43 confirms across both volumes. Each card carries the word, its meaning, an example sentence, and its pronunciation. Scheduling is FSRS-6 at a fixed 0.9 retention target, with no scheduler settings to get wrong.

The caption route. Same app, watching instead of pasting. On a YouTube video that has captions, the transcript appears line by line; click the one line that caught you and the candidates come from that line and nowhere else: a word, its meaning, the sentence actually spoken at that moment. A card saved this way remembers where it was born. At review time it restores the source moment, the video paused at the second the line came from. The boundary is honest: if the video carries no caption track there is nothing to select, and the extension reports that rather than guessing; and the unit of capture is the line you chose, never the whole video in one press. A Japanese-language recording you own can go through the upload route instead, and the transcription comes back in Japanese.

Between sessions. Double-click any Japanese word on any web page and an offline hover dictionary opens — reading and gloss, one click to save into the same review pile.

Which of the three should you actually pick?

Class-paced, quiz on Friday. The per-volume third-edition deck. Ten minutes, mirrors pagination, accept someone else's card shape.

Already an Anki user, or you enjoy the craft. Build your own. Fourteen hours of entry buys a perfectly fitting deck, and the scheduling is equally sound either way.

Already watching Japanese YouTube. Capture as you consume. The Genki list covers classroom order; the words your actual videos keep using are the other half of the language, and no shared deck can ship those. If you're also weighing starter decks, the frequency-list answer is Kaishi 1.5k, and the wider landscape is in The Best Anki Decks for Japanese.

The free tier is 150 energy (about 150 cards), then prepaid top-ups at $5 / $10 / $20; no subscription, and topped-up energy never expires. At 1 energy ≈ 1 card, the free tier is almost exactly two average Genki lessons' worth of vocabulary (74 × 2 = 148) — enough to run the third rung against real chapters and judge it yourself. To start: Piccard on the Chrome Web Store.

Related: JLPT N5 Vocabulary · Best Anki Decks for Japanese · Kaishi 1.5k

All guides: Piccard Blog.