Learn Chinese With These 6 Hand-selected Mandarin Anki Decks

Discovered that learning Chinese means learning like 3,000 unique characters and decided this is a job for flashcards?

Welcome to the team 🫡

To make this post, I went through nearly 1,000 free Chinese Anki decks, picked the best ones, and then introduced them.

[Setup] What is Anki, how to install the flashcard app, and how to download Chinese decks

On the off chance that you're new to Anki, here's a rundown of the absolute basics you need to know to get it set up.

How Anki flashcards and spaced repetition make your life easier

Anki is an digital flashcard application. It's pretty much exactly what you're thinking of when you think of flashcards, with two notable exceptions:

We've actually got an accessible introduction to spaced repetition and how your memory works. If this is your first time hearing of Anki, it's worth taking a ten-minute detour to read.

How to install Anki

For more detailed instructions, see this longer post. Otherwise:

You'll also want to sign up for an account on Anki's website.

And now for the fun stuff!

How to install Mandarin Anki Decks from Ankiweb

Once you're logged into your Anki account, navigate to Anki's "Shared Decks" page. This is a repository of all the decks of Chinese flashcards that people have made and decided to share publicly. Feel free to look around!

Once you find a deck that looks promising, click the blue "Download" button.

Now open Anki. Click "Import File", find the deck you downloaded (it will end in .apkg), and then click "Open":

Anki will automatically handle the setup, and the deck will become available in your Anki Desktop program momentarily. To get access to the deck on your phone, click the "sync" button in the top-right corner of your desktop program. You'll need to be logged in to do this. Next, log into Anki on your phone, click "synchronize" there, and voila!

What "syncing" means is that Anki uploads the deck and its media your account on the AnkiWeb server, then downloads that same content from the web to your mobile device. Depending on the size of the deck you've downloaded, this could take a fair bit of time.

Once it's done, you'll be ready to get started.

Which leads me to...

[Soapbox] The best flashcard deck for Chinese learners shall meet these 6 conditions

I'm going to be blunt here for a moment:

When I say that, I mean that, ideally, a "good" deck should meet six important criteria:

I really wanted to find a deck of flashcards that met all those criteria so I could present it as the best Chinese Anki deck and finish this post in an hour or so.

I didn't find a single deck that met all of the above criteria.

I'm going to share the best decks I found—and I did find some cool ones—but, on the off chance you find a deck that meets the above six criteria, ignore my recommendations and download that deck. That's an awesome deck.

Anyway, that's my soapbox.

There are a few bits of hygiene we should cover, then we'll get into the post.

Three things you should know to use Anki effectively

Anki is cool. You're probably excited. You should be. Everybody is.

Now I'm going to tell you something very important:

There are three main ways that beginners go wrong. Alas, ye shall:

With that out of the way, let's get into it:

1. A solid Chinese deck for absolute beginners

Let's start with a good one.

This is a pretty awesome deck.

To be honest, the only thing I don't like about it is its length: it teaches you all the vocabulary you need to know for the HSK 1, and that works out to 150 words. That's a great start, but it's not quite enough to do much in Mandarin yet.

The front of each flashcard is a word and level-appropriate example sentence; the back of each card has pinyin and zhuyin (Taiwanese pinyin), a definition, and an image. If you tweak the settings a bit, you can also choose whether you see simplified or traditional characters.

I'm going to get picky as we go on, but I've honestly got no complaints here. If you're just beginning to study Mandarin, and you're not sure if you want to pay for a dedicated resource, start with this deck.

2. A massive deck to learn Chinese grammar

So, AllSetResources has published a dictionary of Chinese grammar online for free. It's an awesome resource... and people turned it into an Anki deck.

It's cool.

What's good about the deck:

What's not so good:

All the same, those are pretty minor concerns. This is a pretty solid deck that you can chip away at well into your Chinese studies—you just might need a bit of a running headstart before you're ready to get started with it.

3. A few decks to practice Chinese pronunciation and tones 

So, I've actually got a few decks to share here. I'm pretty happy with what I found.

A deck to learn Pinyin

First, here's a two-part Pinyin deck. (Pinyin is used to write the pronunciation of Chinese characters). The first deck teaches Pinyin initials (the first half of a Pinyin syllable) and the second deck teaches Pinyin finals (the second half of a Pinyin syllable). If you're planning to use Pinyin, you'll want to do both.

You can't really see it in the picture, but the deck works like this:

I really like this approach because it lets you learn the Pinyin with your ears instead of your eyes. There are a lot of basic pronunciation mistakes beginners end up making because they see a Pinyin letter and think it should sound a certain way because it looks a certain way and makes a certain sound in English. Going the other direction helps minimize this issue: hear a sound, think about what you hear, then learn how to represent that sound in writing.

A deck to learn Zhuyin / Bopomofo (Taiwanese Pinyin)

If you're interested in Mandarin as is spoken in Taiwan, you'll instead (or also) want to know Zhuyin (also called bopomofo), which is Taiwan's version of Zhuyin.

This deck is more straightforward: you see a Zhuyin symbol on the front of a card, then you hear how it sounds on the back of the card. The back of the card also provides a bit of extra information about the symbol's formation and the equivalent Pinyin letter.

Two decks to test your ears

This first deck comes from the same person that made the Pinyin decks above. It contains four subdecks—one for Pinyin initials, one for Pinyin finals, one for minimal pairs, and one for tones recognition practice.

The minimal pair subdeck in particular (shown below) is really beautiful. When the front of the card loads, you hear a recording. You'll see two possible Pinyin/Zhuyin representing sounds you could have heard, and you have to pick the right one. The back of the card contains the answer, plus useful diagrams showing how each sound is made.

If you're struggling to differentiate certain Chinese sounds, it's worth spending some time with this deck.

The next deck is short and sweet, but definitely worth spending time with. It's for practicing what are called tone pairs.

Mandarin has 4 tones (1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th), plus a neutral tone, and every single Chinese word is some sort of combination of those four tones. In other words, it's not only important to be able to hear tones in isolation, but also to know what it sounds like to hear a 4th tone (falling tone) transitioning into a 2nd tone (rising tone), and so forth.

This deck will help get your ears into shape so you can do that.

The front of the each flashcard contains an audio recording. The back of the card contains a picture showing the Pinyin of the word that was said, plus its tones.

If you learn to reliably hear each tone pair, it'll help you out with listening comprehension later on.

4. A deck of Chinese vocab / sentences organized by frequency

This next deck I have mixed feelings about. It's the one I personally used to learn vocabulary when I began studying Chinese, and I went on to pass the TOCFL 5 (Taiwan's Mandarin proficiency test, roughly ~HSK8 in difficulty).

The deck contains roughly 5,000 flashcards—pretty much everything you need from HSK1 to HSK6—and they're organized in terms of how commonly they occur in real Chinese media.

What's great about the deck:

The Achilles' heel of this deck is that the example sentences often aren't learner friendly. There are many instances of things like this:

The issue is that the sort of person who is learning a word like truth probably isn't ready to learn timeless or revolve. That's not necessarily a deal breaker (like I said, it's what I used, way back in 2018!) but it's definitely a kick in the shins.

Even so, this is still the best Chinese vocabulary deck you'll find for free.

5. A streamlined course from zero to advanced

I've shared several pretty nice decks, and I've got a few more to share below.

Consistently, though, I've been saying: "This is a cool deck, but..."

And that "but" annoyed us at Migaku enough that we ended up making our own decks from scratch to meet the 6 Golden Rules of Flashcards mentioned up at the top of this article.

Here they are, in brief:

Migaku Chinese Fundamentals: Learn to read and pronounce the pinyin

Our Mandarin Fundamentals course teaches you how to read and correctly pronounce Pinyin. You'll get a detailed but accessible explanation of how each Pinyin final and Pinyin initial works, then learn how they sound by doing flashcards in which a native speaker pronounces syllables including that particular Pinyin.

Once you finish learning Pinyin, you'll move on to learn about the tones and how they fit together, doing a similar sort of tone-training as discussed at the end of section 3.

It'll take about 2 weeks to finish the deck, and by the time you finish, you'll be able to confidently pronounce any Pinyin word you see. Or, if you do 13 flashcards per day, you can actually finish the entire Fundamentals course during Migaku's 10-day free trial:

Migaku Chinese Academy: Learn the most common ~1,500 words and ~300 grammar points

The Migaku Chinese Academy is a much cooler deck: it teaches you the 1,500 words (and 330 grammar points) you need to make sense of 80% of the sentences you encounter in Chinese media.

As you progress through the deck, you'll read a lesson introducing a grammar point and then learn several flashcards which utilize that grammar point. What's special is that all of the flashcards have been carefully curated so that each one introduces precisely one new vocabulary word—the result is that you're always learning something new, but are never overwhelmed.

This deck will take about 6 months to finish if you learn 10 words per day, and by the time you finish, Chinese will have gone from foreign to familiar. You won't be fluent, but you'll have built the foundation you need to begin exploring real Chinese media.

Migaku App & Extension: Learn Mandarin by sentence mining

So, we've got an entire blog post that talks about how to learn vocabulary. It contains two major takeaways:

And this leads us to a really, really important point:

With this in mind, the most "optimal" way to learn is to make your own flashcards out of vocabulary words you encounter while consuming Chinese media. This ensures that every single word you learn is something that will actually help you do the things you are interested in doing.

Migaku was actually built for precisely this purpose. We work with pretty much anything that has text—websites, YouTube, Netflix, etc—and enable you to click on words to see definitions of what they mean.

For example, here I'm watching a video essay about the Taiwanese drama The World Between Us. I encountered the word 酬勞 (chou2lao2), and I don't know what it means, so I just clicked on it:

That word seems useful, given my current level, so I clicked the orange-button in the top-right corner of the pop-up dictionary. As a result, Migaku automatically created the below flashcard using the YouTube video, its audio, and its subtitles:

As you do so, you can use Migaku to turn any useful words you find into flashcards. The result is that you'll improve in Mandarin as a byproduct of entertaining yourself. Pretty cool!

6. An Anki deck for learning Chinese characters

So, I debated about including these decks here. While I think it makes sense to intentionally learn the most common ~1,000 Hanzi, I'm not quite sure that this sort of deck is the way to do that. Three big reasons for this:

Anyway—I ultimately decided that it isn't my place to make that decision for you. As such, if you'd like to learn the Chinese characters with Anki, here are the decks I'd use to do that:

An Anki deck to learn simplified Chinese characters

This deck is pretty straightforward:

This deck won't teach you any Chinese words. It's purely a way to get a rough idea of what particular Chinese characters mean.

[Fix] This deck is slightly broken...

An Anki deck to learn traditional Chinese characters

I unfortunately didn't find a deck I feel comfortable recommending to learn traditional Chinese characters 🙁 I will update this section if/when I do.

An Anki deck for learning the radicals

If you like the idea of learning Hanzi by making stories out of their component parts, but don't want to wade through a deck of 3,000 characters, you can sort of DIY that process by instead learning the 214 Kangxi Radicals.

How Hanzi and radicals work is beyond the scope of this post (see this blog post for that), but the basic idea is that they are recurrent parts that occur across multiple characters. It's not what they were originally intended for, but if you know your radicals, you can condense a character with 10+ strokes into just 2–3 components, which makes the character easier to remember.

7. A deck to practice Chinese listening comprehension 

The last deck I'd like to share is sort of an extension of the pronunciation decks introduced in section three. The idea is that:

If you're newer to Chinese, you can focus purely on the Pinyin to see if you're picking out the correct letters and tones. If you're more experienced with Mandarin, you can focus on the characters themselves.

I don't think anyone should do this entire deck—you're better off building your listening comprehension skills naturally over time, by consuming Chinese media you enjoy—but if you're really feeling stuck, go ahead and do a few hundred cards. The deck will force you to rely on your ears, rather than your eyes, and the skills you build will feed right back into your YouTube binging.

Anyway—if you're here because you want to learn Chinese...

Wrapping up, I'd like to present you with one final Golden Rule of Flashcards:

It takes time to learn a language—especially one as difficult as Chinese.

The good news is that the vast majority of that time commitment will be enjoyable. It takes a bit of time to get your feet under you, but a lot of fluency is really just a byproduct of having spent a lot of time doing things you personally find enjoyable in Mandarin.

In other words: you don't need to get fluent before you can start doing cool things in Mandarin. On the contrary, you become fluent in Mandarin by doing cool things in Mandarin.

Grind those flashcards and make your gains—but remember to spend time with real Mandarin content, too!