Deck for 四字熟語

Hairymini · November 15, 2025, 4:13pm

Does anyone have a list of 四字熟語 or 4-kanji compounds to make a deck from?

travv0 · November 15, 2025, 5:43pm

Here’s a list of over 6000 of them: Yojijukugo Mozc - Pastebin.com

teapotahedron · November 15, 2025, 8:16pm

JMdict advanced search has a #yoji tag with 1830 results. With all the word frequency filters active there’s a much more manageable 172 that are presumably the most common. I’ve regex’d out the word IDs and stuck them on pastebin. You should be able to just feed that list into the deck importer to get started.

Hairymini · November 16, 2025, 12:03am

Wonderful, thanks so much! This looks fun to work through - frequency is a good filter and I think getting a good introduction is what I’m hoping for with the deck. There’s a lot of really interesting ones out there, but I hope it covers the standard ones.

veritas_nz · November 16, 2025, 8:07am

Don’t forget to use the Deck Import tool once you’ve got that list!

Hairymini · November 16, 2025, 10:53am

That tool is incredible. Helped me port my word list from Skritter to a personal deck. Can’t wait for custom deck editing to come to mobile.

I’ve sent the deck to be a public 四字熟語 deck.

teapotahedron · November 16, 2025, 12:36pm

Good stuff. I felt I ought to do that but I’m a horrible perfectionist so I’d have to curate it (which I’m wholly unqualified to do), and figure out how representative the jmdict frequency lists are, and go down a host of other unnecessary rabbit-holes instead of just doing the thing. In the end, everyone else ends up with nothing instead of a useful resource.

bunnypro · November 16, 2025, 1:44pm

Just FYI, those rabbit holes are quite comfortable

teapotahedron · November 16, 2025, 3:30pm

That’s what I’m worried about. Get nice and cozy down there amongst all the fluff, rolling my own word frequency analysis instead of studying grammar.

Hairymini · November 16, 2025, 11:28pm

I think for most decks an 80-20 approach is suitable. Get the most frequent ones and keep the deck a bit leaner.

There are some scholarly people who will want to know everything about a deck’s topic. However I think being able to give people a solid and deep appreciation is preferable without overwhelming them.

I have my own onomatopoeia deck based on a book I bought with around 200 onomatopoeia, but I struggle to see value in the full 800 onomatopoeia deck. Even 200 onomatopoeia is more than the average Japanese learner will readily know.

Hairymini · November 16, 2025, 11:29pm

I’ve also done no categorisation of the lists of words provided. Maybe there’s some thought that could be provided there. But for me there’s a small delight in learning a new one each day for half a year.

teapotahedron · November 17, 2025, 12:08pm

Completely agree about focusing on the most frequent items. The marginal utility of the thousandth obscure idiom can’t be terribly high.

At least you can set the deck learning order to frequency, but I still feel kinda bad that I just dumped a list ordered by kanji and reading instead of something useful. Also, I’ve seen a couple of people say JMdict’s frequency lists aren’t the best, so I’m trying to put together an alternative list and see how that compares. Currently torturing a few hundred MB of json instead of doing my reviews. Good times.

teapotahedron · November 18, 2025, 12:16am

Right, I’ve re-done it sorted by jpdb frequency instead and split it into units covering the top 60k vocab. It might be better now, but I’m not sure how I’d tell.

I’m also a little concerned about different spellings being counted separately skewing the results but I may be able to correct for that. I could try using the bccwj frequency data as well and see how that compares, but it’s getting late.

I don’t mind making a public deck and taking responsibility for the thing if you don’t want to deal with the consequences of my questionable decisions.

Deck Importer Source

upadhyayjb32 · November 18, 2025, 1:08am

Not exactly what you’re looking for but I made a deck for a Pokemon theme song that includes a lot of yojijukugo’s if you wanna check it out.