Funny you should mention German -- I started learning German with someone else's German vocab deck (one of the ones that's on Ankiweb, possibly even the same one you used). Those first 200 words were not terribly well-chosen, in retrospect, but I digested them in 12 days, 20 words a day plus 2 review-only days at the end. Since then I've been adding to it, and have created other decks for grammar and irregular verbs and things like that.

It was the first Anki deck I've ever used, and I've never used Anki for anything but German, so I don't have a very broad perspective. But it worked for me.