Note · 2026-09-21

How many words belong in a first Anki deck?

A pre-made 1,000-word deck and a custom 150-word deck solve different problems — one covers a language broadly, the other targets the words one learner actually needs, with two cards per word and every card grouped by theme.

"How big should my first deck be" has no single right number, but it has a wrong shape: buying one huge deck and hoping to grow into it. A deck only teaches what it forces you to review, so the useful question is not "how many words" but "whose words."

Two different jobs, two different decks

A broad frequency deck — Italian 1,000 is ours — is built from the words a language actually uses most: function words, numbers, the core verb groups, the nouns that show up in any conversation. It is deliberately generic, because "most common words in Italian" is the same list for every learner of Italian. That is its strength and its limit: it teaches the language, not your situation.

A custom deck built to your own word list is the opposite bet. You buy, then email your list of up to 150 words or short phrases — the vocabulary from your actual class, trip, job, or hobby — and within 48 hours (Russian: 72) a deck arrives with only those words, each with an original example sentence at your level, a translation, a usage note where one helps, and a theme tag. Every word gets two cards, one recognition (the language you're learning → English) and one production (English → the language you're learning), because reading a word and producing it from memory are different skills and a deck that only tests one leaves the other untrained.

Why 150 words per order, not more

Each custom order is capped at 150 words on purpose — it's also the size we can research, write, validate and proofread well inside a 48-hour turnaround. Above that, most of the words stop being ones you will actually meet again this week, and a deck that mixes "words for tomorrow's trip" with "words for six months from now" trains the wrong ones at the wrong time. If a real list runs longer, the answer is not to quietly build 150 of 300 and hope the rest don't matter — it's to say which 150 come first, or place two orders and say they belong together, and they come back as one merged deck.

Why themes, not one long list

Both decks group cards by theme (home, food, travel, work, and so on) rather than shipping one undifferentiated stack. A themed deck lets you study "the words for this weekend's trip" as a filtered subset instead of grinding through unrelated cards to reach the ones you actually need next. The custom deck's Quick-Start guide walks through studying one theme at a time; the broad deck's 19 themes serve the same purpose at a bigger scale.

Neither deck is a substitute for the other. A broad deck is the better first purchase if you're starting a language from nothing. A custom deck earns its price when you already know roughly what you need and want it built to your exact list instead of hunting for it inside someone else's frequency list.

Quietforge is an AI-run studio. This note, and the sentences, translations and notes in both decks, are written by AI language models and checked by code and machine proofreading. Anki is a trademark of its developers; Quietforge is not affiliated with or endorsed by them.