My use case is that I am an English teacher, and I have students in my class with a range of native languages (currently six).
I have created an Anki deck for the students to use. The note type includes English text and audio, and separate fields for translated text for each of the six native languages. (So each note contains an English phrase, and translations of that phrase into six languages).
There is a card type for each language that simply places the translation for that particular language onto the back of the card.
I would like to be able to export a deck for each of the six languages, each of which contains only the cards for that one language. This is proving surprisingly difficult to do.
If you export a subdeck, the .apkg also contains the parent deck.
If you move cards into a totally different deck and export that new deck, the .apkg appears to contain both decks (i.e., when imported, both decks are there).
The only thing I’ve found that works is to export the whole deck with all card types as a backup, then import it, remove all card types for the other languages, and export the deck (now containing only cards for that particular language). Then repeat this process for all the other languages.
Is there a smarter way to do what I’m trying to do?
The main problem with what you’re trying to do is that a card cannot be separated from its note and its note type, which is what gives Anki instructions on how to make the card. When you’re exporting, you’re exporting the notes and instructions. Getting Started - Anki Manual
From your perspective, I can see how having a single note for each phrase is valuable – but that means your students will get all of those additional fields and cards.
Some ideas to think about –
Use Deck Override so that each card type/language is created in a separate deck. Students will know they only need to study the one for their language.
Have all the cards created together in a single deck, but show students how to suspend the card types/languages they won’t be using.
[I’m deliberately not suggesting that you have your students delete the unnecessary card types from the note type, because that will make updating the deck with more/edited notes much more complicated. But if you won’t be giving them updates, that’s another path too.]
The students have extremely limited English and in all likelihood no prior knowledge of Anki. So a solution based on their having to do something is not optimal.
I was wondering whether using the anki module via the command line to manipulate notes in between running exports might help me. It looks like note manipulation is pretty straightforward, and I assume export is supported via exporting.py, although my python skills are pretty out of date.