Comment by jaredklewis

I see. Unfortunately I don't know much about the area of using anki in a classroom setting or in case like yours where you want to manage the cards of other students, as I have only ever used it for self study. However, I know that using it in a teacher/student setup is not unusual, so there may be good information out there. Edit: Maybe checkout https://www.ankicollab.com/

In terms of updating decks, I think the way it works is pretty intuitive: you have one static field (like in your Chinese example, maybe a particular character or word). When re-importing into a deck, as long as that one static identifying field is the same, all the other fields will be updated. If you want to even be able to change the character/word/whatever, you could make that static field an ID or such.

Also, it is a pretty common pattern for shared decks to come with gobs of cards. You then suspend all of them (sometimes they all come pre-suspended) and then unsuspend the ones you want to study, usually using tags. For example you download the 20k JLPT (Japanese Language Proficiency Test) Vocab deck, suspend them all, then unsuspend only the levels you want to study (say level 1 or whatever) or those tagged as being very common, or whatever. So imagine what you want to accomplish is probably possible with suspension and tags. Like assigning a tag for each student name or such.

Anki is definitely a power tool, like Photoshop or Neovim. It is generally confusing to use and requires some investment. And there is plenty about it I don't like (media management stands out). But like I said in my previous post, I've never found another tool that even comes close.