Just wondering but is there any reason I hardly ever see people exchanging Anki decks? We do all of these sentence projects and then pass around spread sheets but why not the decks themselves? Copying and pasting from a spreadsheet is easy but starting from a completed deck is even easier.

I think people like to incorporate the spreadsheets into their own decks in their own way.

Also, when given as a spreadsheet, they could just as easily be used with any flash card program.

Personally, I would prefer to share spreadsheets rather than decks. This is because my model is different from other peoples. I think everyone should use my model but there's not a lot I can do if people want to use their own. My model has no English in it, so I have no need for English translations of sentences. I can delete those columns from a spreadsheet. I can also rearrange the columns in such a way that each column matches the right field in my model. I can delete rows that I don't want to put into my deck. I can then highlight the content that I wish to import, copy, paste into notepad, save as utf-8 and import. Very easy.

Wrightak, I'm sure you're aware of the card customization abilities of anki? You can customize which fields to show, where to show them... basically anything you can do with the spreadsheet.

Isn't it still impossible to suspend individual cards in Anki? So why would you use someone's deck and have it delegate the cards to you in a way you can't control? Spreadsheets are the only simple option.

Suspending individual cards in Anki works.

Spreadsheets are transparent and their archive formats are widespread.

With decks the user has less work to do, especially for the cards that need links to media files. Spreadsheets may actually be more transparent, in the sense that they can be browsed and manipulated more easily (even though the deck can also be viewed in a spreadsheet-like window).
Then one could include the spreadsheet together with the deck, just for viewing purposes.

Not this kind of transparency.

Spreadsheets have been around for years. ODS and XLS formats will be supported forever.
Anki is formidable, but resolve is only one person and if he retires, anki will have no maintainer.

I never realised anki was based on Excel format spreadsheets, I assumed it was some sort of proprietary database.
Would the sharing of decks not be easier if people simply posted their decks somewhere, and .zip or similar compressed compilation files where made available? So many people mining sentences and such, seems a waste not to pool resources. I'm still stuck with RtK1, but together with Tae Kim's grammar, sentence SRS seems to be the consensus third pillar of self study.

J

mentat_kgs Wrote:Not this kind of transparency.

Spreadsheets have been around for years. ODS and XLS formats will be supported forever.
Anki is formidable, but resolve is only one person and if he retires, anki will have no maintainer.

I think there will. From hanging out in the IRC channel, I know there's some other people who help him fixing bugs etc. I'm quite sure someone would become the new maintainer if resolve quit. Might not be as many updates etc but I'm sure Anki would live on.

Wouldn't it be cool if Anki somehow evolved into an artificial intelligence that understands computer languages and the human languages it is used to learn?

It is easier to share spreadsheets through google docs.

Jeromin Wrote:I never realised anki was based on Excel format spreadsheets, I assumed it was some sort of proprietary database.

It is not. It uses SQLite, an open source DBMS.