zlacker

>>trms+(OP)
Longtime anki user here. I think the thing people never appreciate with flashcards is that deck maintenance is real work. And in many cases, it's not work that you can do yourself as a learner of the material: the deck really needs to be created by someone who knows the material.

Commercial decks, where the deck maintainer is paid for his efforts, make a lot of sense.

And I suppose if they are making money out of the ecosystem, it also only makes sense that commercial deck makers make a contribution to the technology that makes it possible. I suppose I would prefer that be a contribution rather than ownership and custody, but I suppose Anki's license terms (it is AGPL3+ - I think without a CLA) prevents them closing it.

So cautiously optimistic

>>calpat+4M1
Is it really beneficial to use a deck created by someone else? I thought part of the learning process is really engaging with the cards - by writing them, thinking about them, and making mental associations with things you already know.

>>nickke+hN1
Just as an example: I learn languages using Anki, and I always do it the same way: I use decks that

* exclusively quiz entire sentences

* introduce around 500 new words (a nice mix of nouns, verbs and adjectives)

* use a wide variety of grammatical constructs (including all conjugations of the new verbs),

* and that have audio of a native speaker reading the entire sentence after I "flip" the card

Such a deck needs to be thoroughly designed, and while I could choose the new words and then write software to make sure they are all used equally in sentences and no conjugations are missing, I actually can't easily make sure they are correct and I can't record the audio of the text.