Anki is one of the best tools there is for remembering Chinese words. It’s built on the two study techniques with the strongest evidence behind them, and plenty of learners have used it to build huge vocabularies. But many of them run into the same wall: they know thousands of words and still freeze in a conversation. Anki fills your head with words. It doesn’t teach you to use them.
Here’s what Anki does well, what real learners found, and what closes the gap.
What Anki does well
Anki shows you one side of a card, you try to recall the other side, and you rate how well you did. Words you know come back after longer and longer gaps. Words you forget come back soon.
That’s retrieval practice plus spacing, the two techniques a large review of learning research rated most useful. We wrote about the studies behind them in guess, struggle, remember.
A few more things in its favour:
- It’s free on desktop, Android and the web. The iPhone app is paid.
- It keeps getting better. Since version 23.10 (October 2023), Anki can schedule with FSRS, a newer algorithm that times reviews more precisely than the old one.
- It works at scale. Medical students are among Anki’s heaviest users. In one survey of 201 students, Anki users scored higher on the US medical licensing exam, 241 against 236 on average (Lu et al., 2021). That’s a survey, not an experiment, but it fits what memory research predicts.
Learners who made it work
Olle Linge, who runs Hacking Chinese, one of the best-known sites for Chinese learners, has written that he has studied over 20,000 Chinese words, would expect to score 90–95% on a test of all of them, and spends about 30 minutes a day keeping them fresh (as republished by CLI).
On the Chinese Forums, a learner studying full-time in China described Anki like this (David Ma, 2015):
“The upside is that it lets you cram a lot of new words into your long-term memory with minimal effort.”
He also said making his own cards was what really helped, and admitted it’s not very interesting.
That matters, because vocabulary is where Chinese takes the most time. For an English or Dutch speaker, almost no Chinese word looks or sounds familiar. Each one comes with a tone, often a new character, and nothing to hang it on. The US Foreign Service Institute puts Mandarin among the hardest languages for English speakers, at around 2,200 class hours. A tool that makes words stick is a big deal.
Where it falls short: words aren’t conversations
Here’s the catch. In 2015, a learner on the same forum wrote that they had just passed HSK 4 with 80%, had three tutors, and still had an active vocabulary of about 200 words when speaking (Walkingtree, 2015):
“I feel like a child when it comes to be my turn to speak.”
It’s a common story, and Olle Linge himself explains why. A flashcard schedule is designed to bring a word back just before you forget it. That’s efficient, but “just barely recalling what something means is not enough”:
“If you stop and think about every word, you will not be able to have a conversation.”
Picture it. You know 咖啡 (kāfēi, coffee), 热 (rè, hot) and 杯 (bēi, cup). Then you walk into a café, and this is what the person behind the counter says, from Mandarin Hero’s Café lesson:
你好，喝点什么？ Nǐ hǎo, hē diǎn shénme? — Hi, what can I get you? 大杯还是中杯？ Dà bēi háishi zhōng bēi? — Large or medium? 在这儿喝还是带走？ Zài zhèr hē háishi dàizǒu? — For here or to go? 一共三十一，扫这儿。 Yígòng sānshíyī, sǎo zhèr. — Thirty-one, scan here.
Every word is simple. But it comes fast, in full sentences, with no card in front of you and a queue behind you. Knowing the words on a card is one skill. Catching them in real speech and answering right away is another, and Anki doesn’t train it.
Anki covers one strand out of four
Language researcher Paul Nation describes a balanced course as four strands, each getting roughly a quarter of your time. He suggests no more than about 25% goes to studying words and grammar directly (summed up well on Sinosplice).
| Strand | What it means | Does Anki do it? |
|---|---|---|
| Language-focused learning | Studying words, tones, grammar on purpose | Yes, very well |
| Meaning-focused input | Listening to (and reading) real Chinese | No |
| Meaning-focused output | Saying what you mean | No |
| Fluency | Using what you already know until it’s fast | No |
That’s why someone can spend a year in Anki and still not hold a conversation. They’ve done one strand very well, and skipped the other three.
The fix, as one forum member put it: “The answer is essentially to use it.” Put new words into sentences, hear them in real conversations, and say them out loud until they come without thinking.
How Mandarin Hero puts the pieces together
We built Mandarin Hero because we wanted both halves in one place: the memory power of spaced repetition, and the conversations that turn words into speaking.
- Lessons for real situations. The café, the taxi, the pharmacy, meeting people: 32 lessons, each starting with its key words and handy phrases, with audio on every line.
- The conversation, the way people really talk. You hear how it goes, then other ways it can go, because the barista won’t always say the same thing. We wrote about why we start with real conversations from day one.
- Your turn. You say your part of the conversation out loud, then check. Lost? Tap Say it again: you ask 不好意思，再说一遍？ (Bù hǎoyìsi, zài shuō yí biàn?, “Sorry, say that again?”), and the other side says it another way, just like a real person would.
- Flashcards, with spaced repetition built in. Every word and phrase you met in a lesson comes back right before you’d forget it. A word only counts as mastered once every card for it has reached a 21-day interval.
- Whole HSK levels when you want more. Switch on HSK 1 to 6 in Flashcards: all 5,000 words, with example sentences. No decks to find or build.
| Anki | Mandarin Hero | |
|---|---|---|
| Spaced repetition | Yes, fully customisable | Yes, built in |
| What to learn next | You decide, and find or build the decks | Lessons and HSK levels, chosen for you |
| Real conversations | No | Every lesson |
| Saying it out loud | No | A role-play in every lesson |
| Price | Free (paid on iPhone) | First four lessons and HSK 1–2 free |
To be fair to Anki: it’s free, and nothing beats it if you want to review anything, with total control. And to be honest about Mandarin Hero: it doesn’t grade your pronunciation, and it isn’t a real person. Once the first lessons feel easy, a weekly half hour with a tutor is still the best way to move on to free conversation.
The bottom line
Anki works. It’s one of the most efficient ways to get Chinese words into long-term memory, and vocabulary is the slowest part of learning Chinese. But words alone don’t make you speak. You need to hear them in real conversations and say them out loud, again and again, until they come without thinking.
If you’d like the flashcards and the conversations in one app, Mandarin Hero is free to start. Still comparing? Here’s an honest look at the best apps for spoken Mandarin.