Spoonfed Chinese Anki Deck Review: Is It Worth It?

Spoonfed Chinese is a ready-made Anki deck of over 8,000 Mandarin sentences. Each has the characters, pinyin, an English translation and a recording by a native speaker, and the sentences are ordered so each new one brings in only one or two new words. It's sold on Gumroad as pay what you want, from $3, in Simplified or Traditional characters.

The verdict: for a beginner or lower-intermediate learner who wants a ready-made sentence path and will open Anki every day, it's very good value, and many learners credit it with thousands of words. It's a poor fit if you're studying for the HSK (it doesn't follow the HSK word lists), if you're already past about HSK 5, or if you need every translation and recording to be right, because it has known errors and uneven audio.

A word on bias: we make Mandarin Mosaic, an app that also teaches through sentences with one new word each, so this deck is a competitor. We haven't studied the deck ourselves. This review is based on the Gumroad listing, checked on 2 November 2026, and on what learners say in reviews and forum threads, all linked below.

Spoonfed Chinese at a Glance

What's in the Deck

The Gumroad listing describes "a deck of over 8000 sentences (2-4 years worth of learning)". For every sentence you see the characters (hanzi), the pinyin and the English, and you hear the Chinese "spoken by a native speaker". The idea is in the name: you're fed a little at a time, and you learn new words, grammar and characters by meeting them again and again in real sentences.

• Two cards per sentence. The listing's set-up notes say Anki's default of 20 new cards a day "means 10 new sentences per day", so each sentence makes two cards. The first shows the characters and plays the audio after a one-second pause, so you can try reading it first. A review quoted on the listing describes "Chinese to English, English to Chinese" cards.
• Incremental order. "The sentences are ordered incrementally, with each new sentence introducing only 1 or 2 new words." Reviewers say this mostly holds. One AnkiWeb reviewer, who spent about three and a half years on the deck, found that "occasionally, the i+1 structure drops off and 2-3 new words will be present in a sentence."
• Grammar notes. Some cards carry short notes: "(also …)" for another correct way to say it, "(no …)" for a common mistake, and "(literally …)" for a word-for-word translation.
• Simplified or Traditional. You choose Simplified Hanzi or Traditional Hanzi when you buy. Both cost the same.
• Topics. The early sentences are everyday ones. Later ones are less everyday; the same reviewer felt sentences such as "the cost of production dropped, so the price of the cars also dropped" were less useful than the early ones.

Does Spoonfed Chinese Follow the HSK?

No. The deck is ordered by its own word-by-word sequence, not by the HSK lists, and it doesn't cover all of them. In 2021 a learner on the Clozemaster forum ran the deck through a word splitter and counted the old HSK words it contains: 78% of the HSK 4 words, 62% of HSK 5 and 32% of HSK 6. A 2024 buyer on Gumroad put it this way: "I reckon it's up to about HSK 5 level, but if you wanna go beyond that you need another deck." If you're working towards an exam, check your progress against the HSK vocabulary lists as well.

The Old Free Version

An earlier version of the deck used to be free on AnkiWeb, and the Gumroad listing calls itself "an updated version of the old deck posted for free on Ankiweb", with "a much better ordering of sentences, improved grammar notes". Copies of the old version are still shared on AnkiWeb by other users, but they're older, and people using them report missing audio. One re-uploaded copy lists 7,335 notes but 4,649 audio files, and in February 2026 a learner on the Anki forums wrote that they were "missing about half of the mp3s". If you want the audio, which is half the point, buy the current version.

How Much Does Spoonfed Chinese Cost?

At the time of writing, Spoonfed Chinese is sold only on Gumroad, by a seller called promagma. It's pay what you want: the minimum is $3, which Gumroad showed as £2.24 to UK visitors on 2 November 2026, and there's a "Name a fair price" box if you want to pay more. It's a one-off payment, not a subscription, and you choose the Simplified or Traditional version before you pay. You get an .apkg file, which you open with Anki's File > Import.

The price has always been low. In 2019, on Chinese-Forums, one learner said the improved version cost "a dollar or two"; it was sold through Sellfy then, and had moved to Gumroad by June 2020. The listing doesn't say when the deck was last updated, it has no preview or sample cards, and it doesn't state a licence, so treat your copy as for your own use and don't share it.

What Learners Say

On Gumroad the deck has 4.6 out of 5 from 117 ratings: 83% give it five stars and 7% one star. Only three buyers have written a review there. Most of the long reviews are on AnkiWeb, under the free copies, and on forums. Here's what comes up again and again.

The good

• It works if you stick with it. On Chinese-Forums, a learner who already knew about 1,700 characters suspended the 2,287 cards they knew and studied the rest. Just over a year later they reported: "Over 304 days I learned 2400 words."
• It's easy to keep going. The same learner wrote that the deck "only costs me about 10-15 minutes a day and is easier than making custom sentence cards". The 2025 AnkiWeb reviewer who spent three and a half years on it said: "Overall, I learned A TON."
• It suits complete beginners. That reviewer started "within the first month of beginning to learn Chinese", reading along and connecting the audio with the characters.

The complaints

• Translation errors. A two-star Gumroad review from 2025 warns of "many errors and inaccuracies in this deck", giving the example that 可以 (kěyǐ) and 能 (néng) are both translated "can" without the difference being explained. A long-time user on Chinese-Forums thought "the majority of the mistakes in this deck are inaccurate or incomplete translations". The three-and-a-half-year reviewer estimated the deck is "probably still 95% correct" and published a list of corrections.
• Uneven audio. The same two-star review says "the audio is bad because of multiple different speakers, accents, and speed", and an AnkiWeb reviewer singled out one speaker's non-standard accent.
• English-to-Chinese cards are hard to mark. Many English prompts mean roughly the same thing but expect one particular Chinese answer, so, as one AnkiWeb reviewer put it, the reverse cards become "a check on the exact corresponding phrase in this one deck in this one way".
• No way to try before you buy. The four-star Gumroad reviewer found it "annoying that you can't seem to be able to see a demo in any way, or see what the deck is like at all, or contact the creator."

One more thing to know: the glowing quotes on the Gumroad listing were chosen by the seller, and one of them, "within 1 year I mastered 2200 cards and was fluent in daily-life conversations", is signed "Me (deck creator)".

Pros and Cons

How to Study Spoonfed Chinese Well

If you're new to Anki, our guide to how to use Anki for Chinese covers the settings in more detail. For this deck in particular:

1. Learn pinyin first if you're a complete beginner. The listing itself suggests spending some time on pinyin and the sounds of Chinese before you start.
2. Skip what you already know. If you aren't a beginner, open the card browser, sort by the Due column and suspend cards from the start until you reach sentences with words you don't know. One learner on Chinese-Forums suspended about 2,300 this way. Suspend rather than delete, so you can bring cards back.
3. Keep the order. The deck only works if new cards come in the order they were added. In Anki's deck options, set New card gather order to Deck or Ascending position, never one of the random options.
4. Start small. The listing recommends 5 to 20 new cards a day, and remember that 10 cards is only 5 sentences. If reviews pile up after a few days off, set new cards to 0 until you've caught up, as the listing suggests.
5. Space out a sentence's two cards. Turn on Bury new siblings, so you don't see the English-to-Chinese card straight after its Chinese-to-English partner.
6. Ignore the "Easy Bonus" tip if you use FSRS. The listing suggests an Easy Bonus of 200% to 300%, but that setting belongs to Anki's older scheduler; with FSRS switched on, the Anki manual says it's hidden.
7. Say every sentence out loud. The listing tells you to mimic the speaker. One learner on Chinese-Forums used the English cards for speaking practice: translate the sentence aloud, then play the audio and repeat it until it comes out fluently.
8. Check a dictionary when a translation looks thin. One user met 衙门 (yámen) in 这里曾经是政府衙门 (zhèlǐ céngjīng shì zhèngfǔ yámen), translated "This place was once a government office", and only learned from a dictionary that a 衙门 was a government office in imperial China. Fix the card when you find something like this.
9. Delete sentences you'll never say. The three-and-a-half-year reviewer's advice: "don't be afraid to delete it. At 8000 sentences, you're going to still have a ton of words."

To make the first card play its audio straight away, go to Tools > Manage Note Types, choose SpoonFedNote, click Cards, and remove the [sound:_silence.mp3] line from Card 1's front template, as the listing explains.

Using Spoonfed Chinese in Mandarin Mosaic

You can import the deck into Mandarin Mosaic and study its sentences there instead of in Anki. Our Anki import guide has the details; in short:

1. In Anki on a computer, choose File > Export, set the format to Anki Deck Package (*.apkg), choose the Spoonfed deck, and tick Support older Anki versions. You can untick Include media, because the audio isn't imported.
2. In the app, go to Lessons, then Your Packs, tap Add pack and choose Import sentences, then Choose file.
3. The app reads each field of the note as a column, works out which holds the Chinese and which the English, and skips a pinyin column with tone marks. Check the sentences under Check these look right, then tap Create pack with … and name your pack.

What changes when you do:

• The order is yours, not the deck's. Every sentence is split into words and checked against the words you already know, and lessons pick the sentences with the fewest new words for you. You don't need to suspend what you know; it just won't be taught as new.
• The audio is the app's. The deck's recordings aren't imported. Every sentence gets audio from the app's text-to-speech voices instead.
• Your Anki history stays in Anki. Only the sentences come across, so your progress starts afresh.
• The deck's mistakes come with it. Imported sentences aren't checked by our native speakers, unlike the app's own lesson packs.

At the time of writing, the free plan includes one custom pack, and importing from Add pack creates one, so you can try the import if you haven't made a pack yet. More packs, more than 10 sentences when you add to an existing pack, and more than the free lessons each day need Premium.

Alternatives to Spoonfed Chinese

• Mandarin Mosaic's HSK lessons. If what you like about Spoonfed is one new word per sentence, but you want sentences checked by native speakers and a path that follows the HSK levels, that's what our app's built-in lesson packs are. It works out the next sentence from the words you know, rather than from a fixed list.
• Free sentence decks. Our list of the best free Chinese Anki decks includes the LTL Mandarin decks (five levels), the Chinese Grammar Wiki Study Deck (5,864 cards) and a 300-sentence HSK 1 deck, all checked to import into Mandarin Mosaic.
• Your own sentences. One long-time Spoonfed user on Chinese-Forums moved on to making cards from the Chinese dramas they were watching. Our guide to sentence mining shows how.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Spoonfed Chinese Worth It?

For most beginners, yes: a few dollars for over 8,000 sentences with audio is hard to beat, as long as you treat the translations with some caution. If you're past about HSK 5 or studying for the HSK exam, look elsewhere.

Is Spoonfed Chinese Free?

The current version isn't: it's pay what you want, from $3, on Gumroad. An older version used to be free on AnkiWeb, and copies of it are still around, but they're missing much of the audio.

How Many Cards Are in Spoonfed Chinese?

Over 8,000 sentences, according to the listing. Each sentence makes two cards, so expect about twice as many cards as sentences.

Is Spoonfed Chinese Simplified or Traditional?

Both. You choose Simplified Hanzi or Traditional Hanzi when you buy, at the same price.

How Long Does It Take to Finish?

The listing says "2-4 years worth of learning". One AnkiWeb reviewer took about three and a half years from their first month of Chinese; a learner who skipped the 2,287 cards they knew learned 2,400 words in 304 days.

Who Made Spoonfed Chinese?

It's sold by a Gumroad seller called promagma. The listing doesn't give the creator's real name, and one buyer found no way to contact them.

Does Spoonfed Chinese Work on iPhone?

Yes, with AnkiMobile, Anki's paid iPhone and iPad app. On Android, AnkiDroid is free, and Anki is free on Windows, Mac and Linux. You can also import the sentences into Mandarin Mosaic, which runs on iPhone and Android.

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