I used to be a heavy Anki user around 2010-2013 or so. Kept using it sporadically until about five years ago. Taught myself how to read Chinese characters up to the HSK 4 level with it. I used Anki desktop, Ankidroid and the web interface whenever I could use neither.
Back then, Anki wasn’t really a language learning program. It was more like a DIY language learning kit for people who knew how to write XML. There were a few ways of organizing cards to learn Chinese characters, but “just write your own” was always the advice I got when I said they weren’t optimal.
How have things changed since then? I’m getting back into studying Chinese seriously and I’m back to needing to learn dozens of new characters a day.
Actually, it did start out that way - the original motivation was to help me with my Japanese studies, and to help my English-learning students. Over time, the language-specific features were mostly shifted to add-ons, as Anki is useful in other fields too.
Oh, back then there was this huge buzz about SRS. It was going to make language learning effortless. Everyone was going to become a polyglot. People were bragging that after a few months they could speak 7 languages…etc. And all of it without doing anything, just using this revolutionary new software. But that was just high Openness people gushing about a new toy, like they always do. Turns out Anki is just a tool for rote memorization, an improvement on flashcards. But that’s very helpful for Asian languages, where rote memorization cannot be gotten around. Japanese was always first in support, with Chinese 6-12 months behind.
Sorry to hear users are still expected to do software development of their own cards. That’s painful, but I suppose I’m going to have to knuckle under and figure out how to do it. I really do need to memorize a few thousand new characters.