Best Anki Decks for German: How to Judge One Before You Start

Choosing an Anki deck is a bigger decision than it looks. You are not picking something to try for an afternoon; you are picking the 3,000 cards you will look at every day for a year. A deck with wrong plurals or missing articles does not announce itself. You find out in month four, when you have memorised the mistakes.

The good news is that German is one of the best-served languages on AnkiWeb, and that a deck can be judged in five minutes if you know what to look at. This guide covers the kinds of decks that exist, the check to run before you commit, and the settings that matter once you do.

The four kinds of German decks

Almost every shared German deck is one of these.

Search AnkiWeb for "German frequency", "Goethe B1 Wortliste" or the title of your coursebook and you will find several of each. Download counts and ratings help a little. They mostly measure how old a deck is.

A frequency deck is the right default

If you have no exam date and no class, take a frequency deck. The first 2,000 words of German make up about four fifths of an ordinary page, so learning in frequency order means every week of work pays off at once. The reasoning and the numbers are in how many German words you need.

Two warnings. Frequency lists built from newspapers put Prozent, Regierung and Milliarde in the first thousand and leave out Gabel and Kühlschrank; lists built from subtitles do the reverse. Look at words 500 to 600 of the deck and ask whether that is the German you need. And a raw frequency list is full of words that are grammar, not vocabulary: der, und, sich, zu. A card that says "zu - to, too, at" teaches nothing. Suspend those and learn them through sentences.

The five-minute check

Open the deck browser, sort by any field, and look at thirty cards from the middle. Not the first thirty; everyone polishes those.

• Do nouns carry their article? der Tisch, not Tisch. A deck without articles is a deck you will have to redo. Gender learned late is the most expensive mistake in German, as the der, die, das guide explains.
• Is the plural there? der Tisch, die Tische. German plurals follow tendencies, not rules, so the form has to be stored.
• Is there an example sentence, and is it natural? A sentence shows the case a verb takes and the preposition it wants. warten - to wait is half a card; Ich warte auf den Bus is the whole one.
• Is there audio, and is it a human or a decent voice? Play five cards. Robotic audio with wrong stress is worse than none.
• Is the spelling current? Look for daß and muß. If you find them, the deck predates the spelling reform and nobody has maintained it.
• Are the umlauts real? schoen instead of schön means the deck was typed on a keyboard without them, and you will learn the wrong spelling.
• Are there duplicates and homographs? Search for Bank. A careful deck has two entries, bench and bank, with different plurals (Bänke, Banken).

Thirty cards with two or more of these problems means thousands of cards with them. Take a different deck. The cost of switching today is five minutes; in three months it is your whole review history.

Which card direction

Many decks ship with two cards per note: German to English and English to German. Running both doubles your reviews. A common and sensible approach:

• A1 to A2: German to English only, to build recognition fast.
• From A2: switch on English to German for the words you want to be able to say, or for everything if you have the time.

Production (English to German) is harder and it is the skill that speaking needs. If a deck only has recognition cards, you can add the reverse card type yourself; it takes a minute in the note type settings. Why the direction matters so much is covered in how to make German flashcards.

Settings that matter more than the deck

A good deck with bad settings still fails. Three numbers:

• New cards per day: 10. Not 20, which is the default, and not 50. Each new card produces eight to ten reviews over the following months. The arithmetic is in how many German words per day.
• Maximum reviews per day: high enough that it never bites. If Anki hides due cards because of a cap, the pile grows where you cannot see it.
• FSRS on, desired retention at 0.90. That is the modern scheduler, and its default is a reasonable target. Everything else can stay as it is. A fuller walkthrough is in Anki settings for German.

What no shared deck gives you

Even the best vocabulary deck is a list of words. Three things are usually missing.

Grammar. There are grammar decks, but a card with "Dativ" on the front and a rule on the back is a fact about German, not the ability to say mit dem Auto. Grammar on a schedule needs sentences with gaps, and building those is real work. See spaced repetition for German grammar.

Consistency across levels. An A1 deck from one author and a B2 deck from another overlap, contradict each other in format, and leave gaps between them.

Maintenance. When you find an error, you fix your copy. The next learner downloads the same error.

None of this is a reason to avoid Anki. It is a reason to know what you are signing up for: Anki is free, and the price is your time as editor.

Making your own deck instead

Building cards from what you read and hear is slower and sticks better, because every card has a memory attached: the scene, the sentence, the reason you wanted the word. Most serious Anki users end up with a mix, a shared frequency deck for the base and a personal deck fed by reading. The method is described in sentence mining for German. Twenty self-made cards a week is a healthy pace; more than that and you are a card maker, not a learner.

When a ready-made course is the shorter road

Shared decks answer the question "where do I get cards". They do not answer "are these cards right, complete and in a sensible order from A1 to C2". If you have run the five-minute check on four decks and found problems in all of them, that is the gap merke.me was built for.

It is our product, so take this as a description, not a verdict. The vocabulary is the 10,000 most frequent words plus the Goethe exam lists and everyday topics, each noun with article and plural, each entry with translated example sentences and audio. About 480 grammar points are reviewed in the same queue as fill-in-the-gap items. The schedule is fixed - eight steps from 4 hours to 4 months - so there is nothing to configure. And if you are coming from Anki with a few thousand known words, you can import them so that you do not start again from Hallo.

You can read every entry before deciding: vocabulary, grammar and collocations are open, the decks show the order, and 100 words plus 30 grammar points are free to learn. The longer comparison is in Anki vs merke.me.