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The Best Chinese Anki Decks: 11 Free Mandarin Sentence Decks
Check out our recommended list of Mandarin Anki decks below, which all have English and Chinese sentence examples, meaning they're excellent for sentence mining.
All of the following Anki decks have been verified for import into Mandarin Mosaic, so that you can get started straight away immersing yourself in sentences drawn from real-world sources. Check out our Anki deck import guide for instructions on how to import Chinese Anki decks into Mandarin Mosaic.
New to Anki? Our guide to how to use Anki for Chinese covers the card types, templates, add-ons and settings that work for Mandarin.
Learning Chinese for work? See our separate list of the best Anki decks for business Chinese and the BCT, with a core list of workplace vocabulary.
The Spoonfed Chinese deck that Reddit often recommends isn't free, so it isn't on this list; our Spoonfed Chinese deck review covers what's in it and how to study it.
LTL Mandarin Anki decks
- LTL Mandarin Chinese Anki Deck Level 1
- LTL Mandarin Chinese Anki Deck Level 2
- LTL Mandarin Chinese Anki Deck Level 3
- LTL Mandarin Chinese Anki Deck Level 4
- LTL Mandarin Chinese Anki Deck Level 5
These are a collection of Anki decks provided by the Chinese language learning organisation LTL Mandarin. They are conveniently organised into several levels from basic to advanced. English sentences have been taken from the Tatoeba Project. Although some sentences in these decks are slightly strange, on the whole we found them useful for expanding our vocabulary.
Chinese Grammar Wiki Study Deck
The Chinese Grammar Wiki Study Deck contains 5864 cards from the popular website Chinese Grammar Wiki. As such, it focuses heavily on grammar structures. We generally found the sentences to be of high quality. Although the vocabulary is limited, it's a great resource for learning many new grammar structures and will definitely complement your learning material.
800 Basic Chinese Characters
The 800 Basic Chinese Characters Anki deck provides example sentences in Chinese and English for 800 of the most commonly used Chinese characters. This deck is aimed at beginners so the sentences don't contain too many high level complicated words. We found it refreshing to study after tackling some of the more difficult decks.
Anki Decks for Chinese Characters
If you want to learn characters one at a time, with their stroke order, rather than in sentences, two free decks stand out. They're not among the 11 sentence decks on this page, and we haven't tested them with Mandarin Mosaic's import. At the time of writing:
- Most Common 3000 Chinese Hanzi Characters: 3,000 characters in frequency order, each with pinyin, audio, meaning, radical, stroke count, HSK level and a stroke-order diagram, plus the traditional forms. It was last updated in 2015, and its author warns that some diagrams have errors.
- Anki xiehanzi's New HSK 3.0 deck: characters for HSK levels 1–9 with separate card types for meaning, pinyin, audio and writing each character stroke by stroke, in Simplified or Traditional (updated January 2025).
The 800 Basic Chinese Characters deck above is the gentlest of the three, because every card also has a sentence. For how to combine character study with words, see our guide to how to learn Chinese characters.
Chinese HSK1
The Chinese HSK1 Anki deck is a collection of 300 example sentences for HSK1 words from chineseaudioflashcards.com. All sentences only contain HSK1 words which makes it a great resource for beginner level learners. This is great as a first deck to start on for pure beginners. Our HSK 1 vocabulary list has all 150 words with an example sentence each, and if you're not sure which level's deck to pick, the free Chinese level test estimates your HSK level.
Chinese Mandarin HSK3 sentences
The Chinese Mandarin HSK3 sentences Anki deck contains 151 cards at HSK3 level making it a small but useful deck for lower intermediate level learners.
Chinese 100 most used words in example sentences
The Chinese 100 most used words Anki deck contains 107 cards for the 100 most used Chinese words. It's also another great deck for pure beginners and contains more well-rounded vocabulary as it's not focused directly on the HSK lists.
AP Chinese Vocab with sentences
The AP Chinese Vocab with sentences Anki deck contains 851 sentences on a wide range of topics including family, art, culture and science. We found the broad range of topics covered quite useful. The sentences have been generated with ChatGPT-4, so not all may be entirely accurate, but are a good source of vocabulary.
