Kaishi 1.5k: What the Default Japanese Starter Deck Is, and What It Isn't

Ask r/LearnJapanese how to start vocabulary and, most weeks, the top answer is two words: Kaishi 1.5k. That is a strange thing for a deck to become. Nobody talks about a flashcard deck this way in most languages — but in Japanese, one specific shared Anki deck has quietly turned into shorthand for "the correct first move." When a free community file becomes the default answer to a question millions of people ask, it is worth understanding what it actually is, because the praise is mostly deserved and the gaps are mostly unmentioned.

Usual disclosure: I build Piccard, a flashcard tool that competes with a small slice of what Anki does, so I read these threads as market research. Nothing here is "don't use Kaishi." It is: know which half of the problem it solves, because the other half is where people quietly stall.

What it is, in three facts

A community deck, free. Kaishi 1.5k (開始 — "start," which is the whole attitude) is not sold by anyone. It was built in public by the immersion-learning community as a modern replacement for the older Core decks, and it spread on merit: this is the deck people wish they had started on.

About 1,500 words, ordered by frequency. If you can only learn 1,500 things, learn the 1,500 that show up most. That is the whole logic, and it is unglamorous and hard to argue with: the most useful words come first, so the vocabulary that covers ordinary sentences arrives sooner than it would through thematic chapters or textbook pagination.

Cards carry example sentences. Compared with the bare word-list decks of the previous era, this is the single biggest quality jump, and it is why the community migrated: each word arrives with a sentence around it, so you meet it in use rather than as a floating translation pair.

Put together: a curated, ordered, contextualized first 1,500 words, for free. The cold-start question — "which words do I learn first?" — has rarely been answered better.

What it leaves you to handle anyway

Kaishi solves the *content* problem. It does not touch the *machinery* problem, because it ships as an Anki deck and inherits everything that comes with that. Deck options, new-cards-per-day limits, sync across devices, the settings surface where a beginner can configure FSRS wrong: none of that is Kaishi's fault, and all of it is now your evening. We have written that critique in full elsewhere (where the complexity of Anki actually lives); the short version is that a starter deck and a zero-config starter experience are two different products, and only one of them comes in the download.

The second gap is quieter. Kaishi 1.5k is the same 1,500 words for everyone. You are not everyone. Most people arriving at "learn Japanese" already carry exposure — anime, games, a semester of class — and sit somewhere between "knows 200 of the list cold" and "knows 900." A fixed list has no way to know which third of itself is wasted motion for you, so you either grind known cards or spend an evening suspending them by hand.

And past the 1,500 mark the deck, by design, ends — while your material doesn't. The show you're watching and the manga you're reading contain words ranked well below the frequency cutoff that you personally meet every single page. No shared deck covers those, because nobody can ship a deck of words *you* don't know yet. That filter question — what deserves to become a card at all — has its own write-up: Which English Words Are Worth Learning? A Three-Part Filter. The framing survives translation.

The natural second half

First 1,500 words from a list: correct move, use Kaishi. Everything after that comes from material you actually consume, and that half is a capture problem, which is the part I built Piccard for, so here is what it does, described as it ships.

While watching. On YouTube videos that have captions, you get a per-line transcript. Click a line and candidate cards come back: the word, its meaning in English, an example sentence from that line. Keep what's worth keeping, discard the rest. The clicked line only; a video without captions has no lines to click, and we fail honestly rather than guessing. Japanese is one of the fully covered directions: the popup dictionary that answers a double-click on any web page runs on JMdict data.

From documents. Paste text or upload a PDF — a transcript, an article, a textbook chapter — and candidates come back ranked 0–100 for how much each is worth learning. One confirm turns at most 20 into cards. The 20 is a named constant in our code, not a growth mechanic: each card costs the model roughly 300–350 output tokens, and 20 keeps a confirm under the output ceiling. Uploading audio or video files for transcription works for English audio only, so for Japanese listening material the caption route above is the route, not file upload.

In review. FSRS-6, zero configuration: 0.9 target retention, and no settings page on which you could get it wrong. A card saved from a video replays the exact YouTube moment it came from. The scheduling argument is settled science (the forgetting curve, spaced repetition); Kaishi on modern Anki schedules with the same FSRS family, and that part was never the disagreement.

If you are walking the deck landscape before committing — what Core 2k is, who the Tango decks are for, whether any of the anime decks are worth it — that comparison now has its own page: The Best Anki Decks for Japanese.

The short version

Kaishi 1.5k is the right answer to the question it answers: the first ~1,500 words, ordered sensibly, with sentences, free. It is not an answer to the two questions that follow — the machinery you'd rather not configure, and the un-shared deck of words only your material contains. Start with Kaishi if you're at zero; from the first episode you care about, capture beats any list. Nothing stops you from doing both halves with different tools, except that one of the halves is an evening of setup.

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. To try the click-a-line version: Piccard on the Chrome Web Store.

All guides: Piccard Blog.