Hack Chinese vs Anki: Which Is Better for Chinese Words?

Choose Hack Chinese if you want a ready-made system for Chinese words and would rather pay than spend time setting up; choose Anki if you want it free, you like control, or you study more than single words. Both are spaced repetition flashcard apps. The difference is that Hack Chinese is built only for Chinese vocabulary and does the setup for you, while Anki is a blank tool that can do almost anything once you've built it.

A word on bias: we make Mandarin Mosaic, a sentence-based vocabulary app, so we compete with both a little. Neither Hack Chinese nor Anki is ours, and we mention our app only near the end. Prices and features are from each product's own website, checked on 26 October 2026.

Hack Chinese vs Anki at a Glance

Setup: Ready-Made vs Build It Yourself

This is the main reason people move from Anki to Hack Chinese.

Hack Chinese starts by asking what you already know and marks those words as "assumed known", then checks a few of them now and then to catch gaps. You add word lists to a study queue from its catalogue (HSK levels, popular textbooks, themed lists such as travel or business, and lists shared by other learners) and set how many new words you want a day. That's it. Its daily "Everyday" session reviews weak words first, then checks assumed-known words, then introduces new ones. Nothing needs designing.

Anki gives you an empty box. You choose a shared deck or build your own, then decide on the note fields, the card types (character to meaning, audio to character, and so on), the new-cards-per-day limit and the scheduler settings. Done well, it's the most flexible learning tool there is. Done badly, it's a pile of mismatched cards and a review backlog. Our post on why Anki is hard for Chinese covers the usual traps, and our Chinese Anki decks guide lists decks that are ready to import, which removes most of the setup.

If you've ever spent an evening fixing Anki decks instead of studying, Hack Chinese is aimed squarely at you.

How Each Teaches the Words

Both use spaced repetition, showing a word again just before you'd forget it, and both test real recall rather than just showing you the answer. Our guide to spaced repetition explains why that works.

• Characters. Hack Chinese includes functional components from Outlier Linguistics: what each part of a character means or sounds like, with ancient forms and stroke order diagrams, plus a short course on how they work. It's a real strength for remembering similar-looking characters. In Anki you'd need a deck that includes component notes, or to add them yourself. Our guides to radicals and learning characters cover the method.
• Recognition and production. Hack Chinese trains recognition by default (see the Chinese, recall the sound and meaning), and version 2.0 added English-to-Chinese recall as an option. Anki can do both, and any other direction, if your card types are set up for it.
• Sentences and audio. This is where Anki pulls ahead. Hack Chinese is about single words. Anki cards can hold whole sentences, native audio, images and cloze deletions, so you can learn words the way they're used. Many good Chinese decks are sentence decks for exactly this reason.
• Handwriting. Hack Chinese doesn't teach it, on purpose: it trains you to recognise characters and type them in pinyin. In Anki you can write on paper and grade yourself, or use writing add-ons. See should you learn to handwrite Chinese?
• Scheduling. Both handle it for you. Anki also offers FSRS, an optional modern scheduler, and lots of settings. Hack Chinese keeps its settings simpler, and lets you mark words as Memorized so they stop coming up.

Imports and Integrations

Hack Chinese can sync word lists with Du Chinese, The Chairman's Bao and Maayot, so words you save while reading turn up in your reviews automatically. It can also import a plain list of words (one per line), including from Anki, Duolingo, HelloChinese and Quizlet, and it removes duplicates for you. Our comparison of Du Chinese vs The Chairman's Bao covers those two readers.

Anki imports text and CSV files and shared decks, and has thousands of add-ons, but it doesn't link to reading apps out of the box. Moving words from a reader into Anki usually means exporting and importing, or using a tool such as Pleco's flashcard export.

Price: Anki Is Almost Free

• Hack Chinese: $12 a month billed yearly ($144 a year), or $18 a month billed monthly, after a 21-day free trial with no card needed. It has a 30-day refund policy.
• Anki: free on Windows, Mac, Linux, the web (AnkiWeb) and Android (AnkiDroid). The only paid part is AnkiMobile for iPhone and iPad, a one-off $24.99. See is Anki free? for the details.

So Hack Chinese costs about six years of AnkiMobile every year. What you're paying for is time: no deck hunting, no card design and no setting tweaks. Whether that's worth it depends on how much you value those hours, and how much you'd enjoy the tinkering anyway.

Which Should You Choose?

• Choose Hack Chinese if you want to build your Chinese vocabulary steadily with no setup, you're working through HSK or a textbook, you read in Du Chinese or The Chairman's Bao, or you've quit Anki before because of the setup.
• Choose Anki if money matters, you want sentence cards with audio, you study other things too, you want a proper phone app that works offline, or you like controlling every detail.
• Try both, cheaply: Hack Chinese's 21-day trial is long enough to judge it. If you're happy in Anki and your reviews feel under control, there's little reason to switch.

Our verdict: Hack Chinese is the better word-list app for Chinese, and Anki is the better tool overall. One thing to bear in mind with both: knowing a word on a flashcard isn't the same as understanding it in a sentence. Neither will teach you to read or speak on its own, which Hack Chinese says plainly itself, so pair either with reading and listening.

A Third Option: Words in Sentences

If the gap you keep hitting is "I know these words on their cards, but I can't follow the sentence", a sentence-first app may suit you better than either.

Mandarin Mosaic, our app, teaches vocabulary in whole sentences, usually with one new word each and checked by a native speaker, with audio and spaced repetition, HSK-levelled lessons and a graded Chinese Articles reader. It also imports Anki decks, so you don't lose what you've built. It has no handwriting, component breakdowns or web version, so it isn't a replacement for Hack Chinese's character tools. Our comparison of Mandarin Mosaic vs Anki, our Anki alternatives for Chinese roundup and our guide to flashcards vs sentence mining go further.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Hack Chinese Better Than Anki?

For a learner who wants a ready-made Chinese word-list system and doesn't mind paying, usually yes: it saves the setup and adds character components. For anyone who wants it free, wants sentence and audio cards, or needs a full phone app, Anki is better.

Is Hack Chinese Free?

No. It has a 21-day free trial with no card needed, then costs $12 a month billed yearly or $18 billed monthly at the time of writing, with a 30-day refund policy.

Does Hack Chinese Have an App?

Not at the time of writing. It runs in a web browser, and you can use it on your phone through the mobile browser at hackchinese.com.

Can I Move My Anki Words to Hack Chinese?

Yes. Export the Chinese words from your deck as a list, one per line, and paste them into a Hack Chinese list; it handles duplicates. Your Anki review history doesn't come with them, but you can mark words you already know as memorized.

How Many Words a Day Should I Learn?

Fewer than most people think. Hack Chinese suggests 200 or fewer new words a month unless you study full time, which is about 5 to 7 a day, and the same pace works well in Anki. Our post on how many characters to learn a day explains why.

Want to learn words the way they're used? Mandarin Mosaic teaches Chinese through real sentences with one new word at a time, with audio, graded articles and spaced repetition, in Simplified or Traditional characters, and it imports your Anki decks. It's on iPhone and Android, and at the time of writing Premium's first month is free, with a limited free plan. Get it on iOS or Android.

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