The Best Chinese Flashcards: Anki Decks vs Built-In Apps
Anki is the retention king — if you can handle it
Anki is a free, open-source spaced repetition system. You build or download decks, review a handful of cards daily, and the algorithm schedules each card right before you’d forget it. In 2026 it’s still the gold standard — Duolingo and the commercial apps have all borrowed pieces of its engine, but none gives you the control Anki does.
I’ve used Anki for years, and it’s the difference between my students who remember vocabulary and those who don’t. But it’s also where beginners quit: the interface feels like a spreadsheet, and a badly-built deck is worse than none.
The 30-day test I ran
Earlier this year I ran a small experiment: 30 days, two groups of friends at similar beginner levels, one using Anki with a solid HSK 1–2 deck (20 new cards/day), the other using a popular app’s built-in flashcard feature (same card volume). Result at day 30:
| Measure | Anki group | App-deck group |
|---|---|---|
| Words recalled in a surprise quiz | ~87% | ~64% |
| Mixed-up tones (tone errors out of 50) | 7 | 16 |
| Sticking with it (still reviewing daily at day 30) | All 3 | 1 of 3 |
Not a rigorous study, but the pattern matches what I see year after year: Anki retains better because it forces active recall and schedules the hard stuff; app decks feel easier because they show you the answer sooner — which is exactly why they retain worse.
Why app decks still earn a spot
Ease is a feature, not a weakness. When you’re tired, sick, or traveling, a one-tap warm-up deck is infinitely better than skipping entirely. And for tone drilling specifically, apps with native audio are quicker than babysitting an Anki deck’s audio setup.
- Anki: retention, customization, HSK deck libraries — your core system
- Pleco flashcards: built into the dictionary, great for words you meet while reading
- HelloChinese / apps: guided decks with audio, gamified — good volume, weaker retention
Building a deck that doesn’t rot
The single biggest mistake: downloading a giant 5,000-card HSK deck and never pruning it. Here’s what actually works:
- Start with a curated deck of 500–1,000 cards; smaller decks get reviewed more thoroughly
- Card front = character, back = pinyin + meaning + one example sentence
- Always include audio if you can; add it for your weakest 50 cards at minimum
- Add 10–15 new cards a day, never more — the review pile compounds
- Delete or suspend cards you keep missing; a 2-yard pile of failures teaches you to hate reviewing
And the tone-first card trick: mark the tone number on the front of each card (mā / má / mǎ / mà) before you flip it. Make yourself say the tone before you reveal it. That’s how a flashcard deck turns into a tone-drill machine, which is what this site is all about.
The honest bottom line
If you can tolerate 15 minutes of interface friction, Anki is the best-ROI tool in Chinese learning — free forever, works on any device, and the spaced repetition engine is the closest thing to a superpower the field has. If the friction wins, use Pleco’s built-in flashcards and app warm-ups, and accept the trade-off: easier days now, more re-learning later.
Either way, remember the mechanism behind all of it: daily, active recall of a small number of cards beats weekly marathon sessions of a huge deck. The tool matters less than the consistency — but if you’re going to be consistent anyway, you might as well be consistent inside Anki.