How to Use Anki for Chinese: Setup, Cards and Settings

Anki works well for Chinese, as long as you set it up for Chinese. Out of the box it's a blank flashcard app. To make it work for Mandarin, give every word its sound, show it in a sentence, test reading and listening before writing, and keep the number of new cards small. This guide shows you how, with card templates you can copy.

A word on bias: we make Mandarin Mosaic, a sentence-based vocabulary app, so Anki is a competitor of ours. We use it and like it, we mention our app only near the end, and everything about Anki here is from Anki's own manual and the add-ons' own pages, checked on 27 October 2026.

The Short Version

1. Install Anki on your computer (free) and sign in to AnkiWeb so your phone can sync.
2. Use one note per word, with fields for the characters, pinyin, meaning, sound and an example sentence.
3. Turn on two or three card types: reading (characters to meaning), listening (sound to meaning) and, only for words you need to produce, recall (English to Chinese).
4. Get sound onto every card, with Chinese Support 3, HyperTTS or Anki's built-in text-to-speech.
5. Turn on FSRS, keep the desired retention at 90%, and start with about 10 new cards a day.
6. Get cards from a good shared deck or from sentences you actually meet, not from a 5,000-word list you'll never finish.

Is Anki Good for Chinese?

Yes, for remembering. Anki's spaced repetition shows you each card just before you'd forget it, which is the most efficient way to keep thousands of words in your head. Our guide to spaced repetition explains why it works. Chinese needs a lot of memorising (characters, their sounds and tones, and words built from them), so it suits Anki better than most languages.

What Anki doesn't do is teach. It doesn't choose your words, explain grammar or give you anything to read. It also takes setting up, and a badly built deck (no audio, single words, too many cards a day) is the main reason people give up on it. Our post on why Anki is hard for Chinese goes through those problems in detail. The rest of this guide is about avoiding them.

Which Anki to Install

Set up your note types and add-ons on a computer: add-ons only run in the desktop app, and editing templates is far easier with a keyboard. Then review wherever you like. Our posts on whether Anki is free and AnkiDroid cover the versions in more detail.

Notes, Fields and Card Types

Three Anki words are worth knowing before you build anything:

• A note is one thing you want to learn, here one Chinese word.
• Fields are the pieces of information in a note: the characters, the pinyin, the meaning and so on.
• Card types decide which fields go on the front and back. Each card type makes one card from every note, so a note type with three card types gives you three cards per word, each testing something different.

That last point is what makes Anki good for Chinese. You type a word in once, and Anki tests you on reading it, hearing it and saying it, separately and on their own schedules.

These are the fields we suggest, shown for the word 打算 (dǎsuàn, to plan). The first four names match what the Chinese Support 3 add-on looks for, so it can fill them in for you (see add-ons below).

To make the note type, go to Tools > Manage Note Types > Add, choose Add: Basic, name it (for example "Chinese word"), then use Fields to add the fields above and Cards to paste in the templates below. Field names must match exactly, including capitals.

The Card Types to Use

Most Chinese learners need to recognise far more words than they produce, so test them in this order. Reading and listening cards are quick to review, while recall cards are slow and only worth it for words you actually want to say or write.

1. Reading: Characters to Sound and Meaning

The front shows only the characters. Say the word aloud, with its tones, and its meaning before you turn the card over. If you get the tone wrong, count the card as wrong.

<div class="hanzi" lang="zh-CN">{{Hanzi}}</div>

{{FrontSide}}
<hr id="answer">
<div class="pinyin">{{Pinyin}}</div>
<div class="english">{{English}}</div>
{{Sound}}
{{#Sentence}}
<div class="sentence" lang="zh-CN">{{Sentence}}</div>
<div class="sentence-english">{{hint:Sentence English}}</div>
{{/Sentence}}

{{hint:…}} shows a "show hint" link, so you read the sentence in Chinese before you see the translation. The {{#Sentence}}…{{/Sentence}} lines leave that part out for notes with no sentence.

2. Listening: Sound to Meaning

The front plays the word and shows nothing else. This is the card that trains your ear for tones, and it catches the words you can read but wouldn't recognise in speech. In Anki, click Options on the Cards screen to add a second card type, then paste this in.

{{#Sound}}
{{Sound}}
<div class="prompt">Listen. What does it mean?</div>
{{/Sound}}

{{FrontSide}}
<hr id="answer">
<div class="hanzi" lang="zh-CN">{{Hanzi}}</div>
<div class="pinyin">{{Pinyin}}</div>
<div class="english">{{English}}</div>

Wrapping the front in {{#Sound}} means Anki only makes a listening card when the note has audio. Anki doesn't create cards whose front would be empty.

3. Recall: English to Chinese (Only for Some Words)

The front shows the meaning, and you produce the word: say it, then write it on paper or type it in pinyin. It's the hardest card and the slowest to review, so it's only made for notes where you've typed something in the Recall field.

{{#Recall}}
<div class="english">{{English}}</div>
<div class="prompt">Say it, then write or type it</div>
{{/Recall}}

{{FrontSide}}
<hr id="answer">
<div class="hanzi" lang="zh-CN">{{Hanzi}}</div>
<div class="pinyin">{{Pinyin}}</div>
{{Sound}}

Whether to write characters by hand is a separate question. Our post on learning to handwrite Chinese covers it. Many learners only recall words in pinyin and recognise characters, which is enough for typing.

The Card Styling

Paste this into the Styling section of the Cards screen. It's shared by all three card types. Naming Chinese fonts matters: without them, some computers draw a few characters in their Japanese forms. For Traditional characters, use lang="zh-TW" in the templates and put "Noto Sans TC", "PingFang TC" first in the font list.

.card {
  font-family: "Noto Sans SC", "PingFang SC", "Microsoft YaHei", sans-serif;
  font-size: 20px;
  text-align: center;
  color: black;
  background-color: white;
}
.hanzi { font-size: 56px; }
.pinyin { font-size: 24px; margin-top: 8px; }
.english { margin-top: 6px; }
.sentence { font-size: 28px; margin-top: 20px; }
.sentence-english, .prompt { font-size: 16px; color: #777; }

/* Tone colours, used by Chinese Support 3 */
.tone1 { color: red; }
.tone2 { color: orange; }
.tone3 { color: green; }
.tone4 { color: blue; }
.tone5 { color: gray; }

Sentence Cards with Cloze

Once you know a few hundred words, cloze (fill-in-the-blank) cards are a good way to learn how words are used. Use Anki's built-in Cloze note type, put the sentence in the Text field and wrap the word to hide in {{c1::…}}. A hint after a second :: tells you which word is wanted:

我{{c1::打算::plan}}明天坐飞机去北京。

The card shows 我[plan]明天坐飞机去北京。 (wǒ … míngtiān zuò fēijī qù běijīng), and you supply 打算. Put the pinyin and translation in the Back Extra field. Our post on cloze tests for Chinese explains when they help.

Add-ons: Pinyin, Meanings and Sound

Typing pinyin, meanings and audio for every word by hand is what wears people out. Two add-ons do most of it. Install them in the desktop app under Tools > Add-ons > Get Add-ons, using the code shown, then restart Anki.

• Chinese Support 3 (code 1752008591). Type a word into the Hanzi field, press Tab, and it fills in the pinyin, an English meaning from its built-in dictionary, Simplified and Traditional forms and audio fetched from Google or Baidu. It can also colour characters and pinyin by tone. It fills fields with the names in the table above (Hanzi, Pinyin, English, Sound), and you switch it on for a note type with the 汉字 button in the Add window. It also offers ready-made Chinese (Basic) and Chinese (Advanced) note types, under Manage Note Types > Add, if you'd rather not build your own. Its author describes it as still in beta, so back up your collection before installing it.
• HyperTTS (code 111623432). It adds audio from a choice of text-to-speech services. Some are free (Google Translate's voices, for example), and the more natural-sounding ones (Azure, Amazon and others) need your own API key or a paid HyperTTS Pro plan. It's handy for adding audio to a whole deck or to example sentences at once.

If you don't want add-ons, Anki has built-in text-to-speech. Put {{tts zh_CN:Hanzi}} in a template instead of {{Sound}} and Anki reads the word aloud with your device's own Chinese voice. It works on Windows, Mac, iPhone and iPad, and on Android from AnkiDroid 2.17. On Linux it needs an add-on. The voice depends on your device, so it can sound robotic, and it isn't saved into the card.

For a fully automatic pipeline, from sentences to audio to cards, see our post on automating Anki for Chinese.

The Settings That Matter

Open a deck's settings with the gear icon next to it and choose Options. Most defaults are fine. These are the ones to look at.

• FSRS. Anki's modern scheduler, in the FSRS section at the bottom of the deck options. Switch it on if it isn't already. Once you've done a few hundred reviews, press Optimize so it fits your own memory, and do it again about once a month.
• Desired retention: 90%. That's the default, and the right place to start. Anki's manual warns that above 90% the workload rises very quickly.
• Learning steps: short. With FSRS, keep the learning and relearning steps under a day, such as 10m or 10m 30m.
• New cards/day: about 10. The limit counts cards, not words, so with reading and listening cards 10 new cards is about 5 new words a day. That's a steady pace for most learners. Our post on how many characters to learn a day explains why fewer is usually faster in the long run.
• Maximum reviews/day: high. Set it high enough that you finish your reviews each day. A low limit doesn't reduce the work, it just hides a backlog that grows behind it.
• Bury new siblings and Bury review siblings: on. Cards from the same note are "siblings". Burying them means you won't get a word's listening card straight after its reading card on the same day, when the answer is still fresh.

Every new card turns into reviews for months, so your daily review count settles at several times your new-card number. If reviews start taking longer than you have, lower the new cards for a week or two rather than skipping days.

Where to Get Your Cards

• A shared deck. The quickest start. Our guide to the best Chinese Anki decks lists free decks with example sentences, from beginner to advanced, and there's a separate list of business Chinese decks. A shared deck comes with its own note type; you can change its templates to match the card types above.
• An HSK word list. Good for structure, as long as you add words in small daily batches. Our HSK vocabulary lists have every word with an example sentence.
• Words you meet. The cards that stick best are the ones from things you've read or heard, because you already have a memory to hang them on. This is sentence mining. Pleco, the dictionary app, can export your saved words as a text file for Anki to import, and Chinese Support 3 fills in the rest.

Common Mistakes

• Too many new cards. Fifty new cards a day feels productive for a fortnight, then the reviews bury you. Most people who quit Anki quit because of a backlog.
• Cards without sound. If you never hear the word, you'll guess its tones, and the guesses stick. Every card should have audio.
• Words with no sentence. Knowing 打算 means "to plan" doesn't tell you it goes before the verb. One short example sentence per word fixes that.
• Making every card two-way. English-to-Chinese cards for every word double your reviews for words you only need to recognise. Use the Recall field selectively.
• Grading kindly. Press Again if you got the meaning or the tone wrong. Hard is for answers that were right but slow. Grading wrong answers as Hard teaches Anki that you know words you don't.
• Keeping cards you keep failing. Anki marks cards you fail over and over as "leeches". Don't just keep failing them: add a sentence or a memory hook, review look-alikes side by side (such as 买 mǎi, to buy, and 卖 mài, to sell), or delete the card.

When Anki Isn't the Right Tool

If you'd rather not build and maintain a deck at all, or your problem is that you know words on their cards but can't follow them in a sentence, a sentence-first app may suit you better.

Mandarin Mosaic, our app, teaches vocabulary in whole sentences, usually with one new word each and checked by a native speaker, with audio, spaced repetition, HSK-levelled lessons and a graded Chinese Articles reader. It needs no setup and it imports your Anki decks, so you don't lose what you've built. It has no handwriting practice and no desktop version, and it gives you far less control than Anki. Our comparison of Mandarin Mosaic vs Anki and our roundup of Anki alternatives for Chinese go into more detail.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Anki Good for Learning Chinese?

Yes, for memorising vocabulary, characters and their sounds, which is a large part of learning Chinese. It doesn't teach grammar or give you reading and listening practice, so use it alongside a course, graded reading or a tutor.

What's the Best Anki Deck for Chinese?

It depends on your level and goal. A deck with example sentences and audio is better than a bare word list. Our Chinese Anki decks guide compares the best free ones.

Should My Anki Cards Show Pinyin or Characters?

Characters on the front and pinyin on the back. If the pinyin is on the front, you'll read the pinyin and never learn the characters.

How Many New Anki Cards a Day for Chinese?

About 10 new cards (5 words with two card types each) is a good start. Raise it only if your daily reviews comfortably fit the time you have.

Can Anki Show Tone Colours?

Yes, with the Chinese Support 3 add-on, which colours characters and pinyin by tone. The styling above includes the colours it uses.

Does Anki Work with Traditional Characters?

Yes. Anki shows whatever is in your fields, and Chinese Support 3 fills in both Simplified and Traditional forms. Set lang="zh-TW" and a Traditional Chinese font in your templates so the characters display in their Taiwanese forms.

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