Anki for Chinese: when it stalls

Anki is an interval engine. It schedules when a card comes back. It does not pick your HSK band. It does not hear whether 谢谢 (xièxie, thank you) came out flat. It does not tell you whether today is listening or ten new words.

That is not a hidden flaw. It is the design. Anki gives you control: templates, add-ons, custom decks. The cost is that you supply the syllabus. If there is no syllabus, there is a queue. A queue is not a teacher.

A teacher, or a path, answers three things before the first card. Which level you are on. What the study unit is today. Which skill besides recognition is in play. Anki can help with the third if you program it. It does not arrive knowing them.

That is why “Anki vs a Chinese app” goes crooked if you shrink it to the algorithm. Spaced-repetition scheduling is shared science. The stall is usually pedagogical. You know the gloss. You cannot produce. Exam-speed audio feels like a second language.

If you open Anki and the only question is “how many cards are left?”, you have replaced the teacher with a counter. The counter can be honest. It will not sit you on HSK 2, and it will not stop you mixing the six-level paper with the 2021 bands.

The interval does one concrete job. It makes you retrieve the word right as it was about to slip. Cramming 买 (mǎi, to buy) and 卖 (mài, to sell) on the same night feels productive. By Friday the brain flattens them: same skeleton, different tone.

Cepeda, Pashler, Vul, Wixted, and Rohrer put this in *Psychological Bulletin* in 2006. Separate study episodes beat massed study for later verbal recall. The useful gap between sessions grows when you need to remember for longer. That is the spacing effect, stated in plain terms, not a magic “Anki retention” percentage. The paper synthesizes verbal-recall experiments. It is not a ranking of Mandarin decks (PubMed, Cepeda et al., 2006).

That is what Anki does well if you treat it as a clock. Due cards first. A small cap on new ones. A miss is data, not shame. If you want the mechanism behind words falling out, it is in why you forget Chinese words.

Anki truly wins if you like building that clock. You edit the card. You add audio. You trim a sentence. You suspend what no longer earns its place. Those people are not “wasting time on the system.” The system is their method. The rest of this article is not aimed at them. It is aimed at the deck that turned into a warehouse.

A 谢谢 card with hanzi and “thanks” is spelling. It is not hearing xièxie at counter speed. It is not returning the favor without looking at the gloss. If the deck has no audio and no sentence, you are training label-reading.

The same split shows up with 要 (yào, to want / going to) and 不要 (bù yào, don’t want). On a gloss they look like a switch. In a sentence the weight changes. 我要这个 (wǒ yào zhège, I want this) is not practiced by tapping “want.” You practice it by hearing and saying the polarity.

Here is the dirty test. Cover the pinyin. Do you still know the character? Cover the hanzi. Do you react to the audio? Close Anki. Can you use the word in a short sentence? If only the first test passes, the deck is giving you a spelling exam.

This site’s HSK vocabulary publishes hanzi, pinyin, gloss, examples, and audio on purpose. Not so you clone 12,432 cards tonight. So you can see the smallest unit that stops being spelling: character, sound, and use.

If your deck already has audio and a sentence, do not dump it for snobbery. That deck already passed the test. The next bottleneck is usually something else. Continuous listening. Tone pairs. Output with no card in front of you. Anki can aim at those skills if you build the cards. Most “HSK” decks do not. They stop at recognition.

In Anki, a leech is the card you keep failing. The program can flag it so you stop pretending one more day will fix it. In Chinese, many leeches are not laziness. They are the wrong unit.

买 and 卖 as bare cards, with no tone audio, are a leech with a date on it. 要 and 不要 with no sentence are another. 谢谢 without the tone contour leaves you a polite label and an empty ear. The miss repeats because the card asked for the wrong skill.

The fix is not shrinking the interval to ten minutes and grinding. It is changing the card. A tone minimal pair. A sentence where the error changes the meaning. Sometimes you suspend it and practice off-deck: one dialogue, the character once by hand, the sentence out loud.

If every morning the queue is a wall of leeches, the system is yelling. Not “study more.” “This card is not the object of study.” Tapping Good out of habit inflates coverage. It does not inflate Chinese. A chronic leech is a diagnosis. Treat it as design, not character.

There is no honest “best Anki deck HSK” ranking that belongs in this paragraph. Shared decks change. Licenses change. The one that worked for someone on a forum may mix the six-level exam with the 2021 bands. Inventing a podium would be advertising, not method.

Wikipedia HSK summarizes the classic six-level exam. CLEC administers it. Registration stays on chinesetest.cn (Chinese Testing International). Classic HSK 1 is about 150 words. This site lists 12,432 in the public inventory. That second number is not the exam paper. It is a catalog. If your “HSK” deck swallows the catalog as if it were the paper, you have entered a marathon the test center will not ask.

Five decks is the other failure. One HSK 1 deck. One “most frequent 1,000.” One tone-pair deck. One sentence deck from a video. One a friend exported. Each deck has its own SRS clock. Each clock is a starting line. The brain does not merge five queues into a syllabus. You open Anki and negotiate which fire to put out.

One deck. Aligned with the HSK guides for the level you will sit. Audio. A sentence. A single queue. If you want a second deck, let it be an archive, not a second life. “More coverage” with five starting lines is usually less usable Chinese.

Stay if you like building. If editing a card feels like study, not procrastination. If you already have a deck with audio and a sentence, aligned to the six-level paper or, carefully, to the 2021 bands, but not to both at once.

Stay if new cards enter after due ones. If you know which HSK band you are attacking this week. If “what do I study today?” is closed before you open the laptop: the queue, then a short listening and output block outside Anki.

Stay if you treat a leech as a design problem, not a character flaw. Stay if you are not hunting the definitive deck every Sunday. Anki used that way is not a software hobby. It is a lab you maintain. For some people that is the right method. If you are that person, you do not need rescuing from the deck.

Do not stay for sunk cost. Three thousand bad cards are not an argument. They are dead inventory. Suspending is not a betrayal of Chinese. It is refusing to keep training spelling. Pride in a huge deck is not on the chinesetest.cn paper.

Migrate the habit when Anki no longer answers “what do I study today.” When the session is deck maintenance. When you recognize 谢谢 and cannot hear it. When 要 and 不要 work as glosses and collapse in a sentence. When you cannot tell whether you are on HSK 2 or you have drifted into HSK 4 lists.

Migrating is not exporting four thousand cards into another tool and calling them “new.” That doubles the forgetting. The deck stays. You suspend it, or you leave it review-only for a week. It is an archive. It is not tomorrow’s clock.

What you import is the habit. Same order: due before new. Same small cap. A placement to sit you on a band, not a forum thread. Today’s reviews, not the 12,432-word ocean.

The session that fits a workday is in the 20-minute routine: SRS queue, listening, output, tones. If Anki only covered the queue, the gap was not “more cards.” It was the rest of the clock. Bringing the whole deck and keeping the same gap is not a migration. It is a new folder.

The first week, do not measure coverage. Measure whether you opened the queue without negotiating which deck. Whether 买 and 卖 come through the ear, not only the eye. Whether a sentence with 不要 leaves your mouth without a gloss hunt. If that holds for seven days, the habit traveled. The archive can stay in Anki without guilt.

The next step is not a deck ranking. It is a placement and today’s reviews. Sign in, sit a band, and run the queue. Do not copy the whole deck. Copy the order: due cards, few new ones, audio, a sentence.

Chinese Trainer fits if you want that queue already cut to an HSK band, with listening and writing in the same account. The inventory is in what’s inside the app. If the habit holds after seven days, keep going. If it does not, Anki was not the villain. You did not have a clock the day can actually pay for.

Pinyin is the official romanization of Mandarin. Hanzi are the written Chinese characters. HSK is Hanyu Shuiping Kaoshi. Reviewed by Javier Garcia Floriano. About us. Contact.

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