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.
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.
Yes. Absolutely. The biggest data point pushing the affirmative is less Anki itself but the success of products at the forefront of the second wave of spaced repetition apps [1] like Khan Academy. Duolingo, too, but Duolingo gets flak from people for being too Goodhearted by retention for its own good; Khan Academy actually does force feed you enough actual problems to learn some math.
Writing the cards is engaging with the cards for some small subset of the population. I am part of that audience. But most people are terrible at it, and it's not an easy skill to build.
Ther majority of people who are interested in Anki -- and the vast majority of normal human beings with nonzero willingness to pay, which is a very unique subset of the population with goals that tend to look like "Pass X exam by Y date so I can [get a job|earn my citizenship in a better country|...] -- just want good pedagogical material wrapped in some control harness so they can treat some fraction of their learning the same way they treat going to the gym. Show up, put in the reps, get results.
[1]: https://til.andrew-quinn.me/posts/the-second-wave-of-spaced-...
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.
"I thought part of the learning process is really engaging with the cards"
I would substitute "the material" for "the cards" in this sentence. Making the cards yourself is one way to do that, but it's not always the most time effective - imagine the extra work put onto a medical student having to make the cards for every subject they need to cover. That is what ankihub does and it seems to be very popular
But yeah: downloading the median deck off of ankiweb: very sub-optimal
I would also like to second that. For me, making Anki cards was 50% of the learning.