A Guide to Anki Image Occlusion for Learning Chinese

Image occlusion turns a picture into flashcards: you hide parts of an image behind masks, and Anki quizzes you on what's underneath. For Chinese that picture can be a sentence from a textbook, a page of a graded reader, a menu or a character diagram. Since Anki 23.10 the feature has been built in, so there's nothing extra to install. This guide shows how to use it for Mandarin, with three kinds of card to try.

Why Image Occlusion Works Well for Mandarin

Chinese characters are visual puzzles, and similar ones are easy to confuse: 已 (yǐ, already), 己 (jǐ, self) and 巳 (sì, the sixth Earthly Branch) differ only in how far one stroke closes. Text-only flashcards show a character with nothing around it, which gives your memory little to hold on to.

Image occlusion lets you study a character where you actually met it: in a sentence on a page, on a sign, or in a diagram. Hiding part of the image and recalling it is active recall, which strengthens memory far more than rereading.

What You Can Test with It

Here's how it works in practice for learning Mandarin:

• Vocabulary in context: hide a word within a sentence. You recall it from the words around it, which tests how it's used as well as what it means.
• Character components: hide parts of a character such as 家 (jiā, home) to learn its components, 宀 (the "roof" radical) over 豕 (shǐ, pig). Our guide to radicals in Chinese explains why components are worth learning.
• Tones: hide the pinyin above a sentence, so you have to recall each tone rather than read it off the page.

Text Flashcards vs Image Occlusion

Here's how the two compare for learning Chinese characters and sentences.

Image occlusion isn't better for everything. It's slower to make than text cards, and the image can become a crutch: you may remember where a word sat on the page rather than the word itself. It works best alongside text cards, for material that's genuinely visual or that you met in a particular place.

Setting Up Image Occlusion in Anki

If you're on Anki 23.10 or later (released in late 2023), image occlusion is already there as a built-in note type. You don't need an add-on. If you're on an older version, update Anki from apps.ankiweb.net; the old Image Occlusion Enhanced add-on was only needed before the feature was built in.

Opening the Image Occlusion Editor

1. In Anki on your computer, click Add.
2. Click the note Type button at the top left and choose Image Occlusion.
3. Choose an image file, or paste an image from your clipboard.
4. Draw masks over the parts you want to hide with the rectangle, ellipse or polygon tools.
5. Pick a mode (see below), fill in any extra fields, and click Add.

There are two modes:

• Hide All, Guess One: every mask is hidden, and each card asks about one of them. Use this when the other masked parts would give the answer away.
• Hide One, Guess One: only the mask being tested is hidden, and the others stay visible. Use this when you want the rest of the image as context.

Each mask makes its own card. If you group two or more masks, they make a single card and are revealed together.

You can also create image occlusion notes in AnkiDroid (since version 2.17) and recent versions of AnkiMobile, but drawing precise masks on a phone is fiddly, so most people make them on a computer and review on their phone.

Creating Your First Chinese Image Occlusion Cards

Here are three kinds of card you can make in a few minutes: one for character components, one for a whole sentence, and one for a grammar point.

Breaking Down a Single Character

Start with a common character: 家 (jiā, home). A text card links the character to its meaning; an image occlusion card lets you look inside it.

Find a clear image of the character, such as one from an online dictionary that shows its components. In the editor, draw a separate mask over each of its two parts:

• 宀 (mián), the "roof" radical
• 豕 (shǐ), an old character meaning "pig"

Two separate masks give you two cards, one for each component. The traditional explanation of 家 is a pig under a roof, from a time when families kept pigs in or under the house, and a story like that makes the character much easier to remember.

Learning a Sentence in Context

Next, take a full sentence with its pinyin and translation, from a graded reader, a textbook or a subtitled TV screenshot. For example: 我明天要去北京 (wǒ míngtiān yào qù běijīng, I'm going to Beijing tomorrow).

You can make several cards from this one image:

1. Mask the characters: draw a box over 我明天要去北京.
2. Mask the pinyin: draw another over wǒ míngtiān yào qù běijīng.
3. Mask the translation: draw a third over "I'm going to Beijing tomorrow".

Leave the three masks ungrouped and choose Hide One, Guess One. You get three cards, and each one shows two of the three parts and asks you to recall the third: characters from pinyin and English, pinyin from characters, and so on. You learn the characters, pinyin and meaning as one unit.

This is a visual version of a cloze (fill-in-the-blank) card. Our post on cloze tests for learning Chinese explains why that kind of recall works so well.

Targeting a Grammar Point

Finally, focus on a single grammar point, like the particle 了 (le). Find or make an image of a sentence where its job is clear, such as 我吃饭了 (wǒ chī fàn le, I've eaten).

This time, draw just one mask, over 了. The card tests one thing: whether you know that 了 belongs there to show the action has happened. Mining several sentences that use 了 in different ways gives you a clearer picture than any single rule.

Making Cards That Last

A few habits make the difference between cards you remember for months and cards you dread reviewing.

Start with good images. Use clear, legible text with good contrast. A blurry screenshot from a low-resolution video makes you decipher the picture before you can even think about the Chinese.

One Thing per Card

The golden rule of spaced repetition is one fact per card. With image occlusion, resist the temptation to mask a whole paragraph in one go. A card that tests several things at once is hard to answer and hard to grade honestly.

Instead, mask a single word, one character or one grammar point. Small cards are faster to review and easier to remember.

Tags

As your collection grows, tags keep it organised. Start using them from day one:

• By topic: tags like BusinessChinese or TravelPhrases group related vocabulary.
• By level: HSK4_Grammar or BeginnerSentences.
• By source: if you're sentence mining, tags like TVShow or GradedReader remind you where a sentence came from.

Tags also let you build filtered decks for focused sessions, which is useful before an exam.

Make on Your Computer, Review on Your Phone

Because masks are easier to draw on a big screen, a good routine is to make cards in batches on your computer once or twice a week, then review them on your phone in spare moments: on the bus, in a queue, or over a coffee. AnkiDroid is free; AnkiMobile for iPhone is a one-off purchase (see is Anki free?). Syncing between them through AnkiWeb is free.

Image occlusion is one part of a spaced repetition routine, not a replacement for it: keep using text or sentence cards for most of your vocabulary, and save image occlusion for things that are genuinely visual.

Spending Less Time Making Cards

Image occlusion is effective, but it's slow. Finding an image, taking a screenshot, drawing masks and tagging the result takes time, and when you spend nearly as long preparing cards as studying them, it's hard to keep going.

Letting an App Do the Masking

For learning vocabulary in sentences, an app can do the masking for you. Mandarin Mosaic is a sentence-mining app for iOS and Android that keeps track of the words you know and shows you sentences with one new word where possible. That new word is blanked out as a fill-in-the-blank question, which is the same idea as masking a word in a screenshot, without the screenshot. Tap any other word for its pinyin, meaning and audio, and spaced repetition brings words back in fresh sentences when they're due. See how cloze tests work in Mandarin Mosaic.

• No card making: HSK-levelled sentence packs are ready to study, and every built-in sentence is verified by a native speaker.
• Your own sentences too: add sentences you mine to a custom pack, or import text-based Anki decks, CSV or text files (see how to import Anki decks). Image occlusion cards can't be imported, because the Chinese is inside a picture.
• What it doesn't do: it won't help with character components, stroke order or labelled pictures, so Anki's image occlusion is still the better tool for those.

Many learners use both: an app for everyday vocabulary in sentences, and Anki for the visual material that suits image occlusion. Our comparison of Mandarin Mosaic and Anki goes into where each one fits.

Got Questions?

Can I Add Audio to My Image Occlusion Cards?

Yes, and it's worth doing for Chinese. Add an audio file to the Back Extra field and it will play when you reveal the answer, which is great for drilling pronunciation and tones. (Audio in the Header field shows on the front too, so it would play before you answer.)

You can record your own voice, use a text-to-speech add-on such as HyperTTS, or download native-speaker recordings from sites like Forvo.

Is This Method Good for Learning Stroke Order?

It can help. Take a stroke-order diagram that shows the character being built up step by step, mask each step, and use Hide All, Guess One. Each card then asks you to recall one stage. For real handwriting practice, though, writing the character yourself, on paper or in an app that checks your strokes, builds the muscle memory better. Our guide to handwriting in Chinese covers the stroke-order rules.

How Do I Fix Cards Not Syncing to My Phone?

First, sync on your computer after making new cards. Cards with images take longer to sync than text-only cards, so give it a minute.

Then open Anki on your phone with a good internet connection and sync again. If images are still missing, use Tools > Check Media in the desktop app to find and fix missing image files, then sync once more.

What Is the Fastest Way to Make Cards from Websites?

Use your computer's screenshot shortcut that copies an area of the screen to the clipboard: Win+Shift+S on Windows, or Ctrl+Shift+Cmd+4 on a Mac (Shift+Cmd+4 on its own saves the screenshot as a file instead).

Then paste the image straight into the image occlusion editor. This skips saving and choosing a file, which adds up when you're sentence mining a lot.

Anki is a fantastic tool, but making cards by hand takes time. Mandarin Mosaic does the work for vocabulary in sentences, so you can spend less time making cards and more time studying. Try it free on iOS and Android.

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