It's well established in communities that use Anki a lot (like language learners) that someone else's pre-made decks aren't as effective as making your own. Th

It's well established in communities that use Anki a lot (like language learners) that someone else's pre-made decks aren't as effective as making your own. This is indeed a usual claim. But given a reasonably good pre-made deck, I doubt it's universally true if you factor in the time it takes to make the cards. I'm learning Chinese vocabulary with a pre-made deck. I devote 20-30 minutes per day (have been doing so for a couple of years), introducing 8 new cards per day. My success rate is typically worse than for most people who make their own decks (floating around ~80% for mature cards) but I see clear and steady progress. If I wanted to create my own cards, I would probably need to slow the pace to around 2-3 cards per day tops (as deciding which cards to create and then creating them would take time which I wouldn't be able to spend studying), and they would have no audio, which the pre-made deck does and makes a difference.