My anki decks for learning chinese

I’m currently in Taiwan for an exchange semester and to learn chinese. As preparation I already took a language course back in Germany. To learn the chinese vocabulary I am using the FLOSS digital flashcard application Anki. Luckily, there was already a shared deck available for the course’s textbook, Chinesisch für Deutsche 1+2. Sadly it used simplified characters wherefore I started a personal side-project to convert the deck to a deck with traditional characters. The project expanded over time, and eventually, I added audio (with Google TTS), quizzes for the characters, a link to the dictionary hanzicraft and example sentences (with OpenAI).

The decks

You can download the deck here with traditional characters and here with simplified ones. Further I have now adapted the code of my previous deck for the textbooks of my current chinese language courses in Taiwan. For now those decks are only available without example sentences and only for traditional chinese. Download them from the following links:

My decks are based on the cards from the following decks:

When importing the decks I highly recommend enabling “Import any deck presets” since this enables the following, recommended options:

New cards/day: 15 (reasonable workload & divisible by three)
Maximum reviews/day: 150 (reasonable workload & divisible by three)
New card sort order: Order gathered
New/review order: Show after reviews

Usage

If you haven’t used Anki yet, Anki’s official Getting Started Guide is a good starting point. The documentation page on studying is also highly recommended.
Additionally, I recommend using these decks on your smartphone with Ankidroid (Android, free), Ankimobile (iOS, paid) or Ankiweb (available on all platforms, free). Ankiweb can also be used to synchronize your decks between different platforms.

Features

The audio is played on viewing the backside, but you can also automatically trigger it (on the back) by pressing the play button or typing r.
The back of the Zh→En+Pin card includes outlined quizzes for the characters so that you can try to write the character with the correct stroke sequence the first time you see the character. You can try out the quizzes on this site. The backs of En→Pin+Zh and Pin→Zh+En have the same quiz but without an outline.

The buttons have the following functionality:

↺ Restarts the quiz
⏵ Starts the animation of the character
› Draws the next stroke (useful for some characters, e.g. 6th stroke of 圖 is too short)
⏭ Draws complete character
📕 Opens the page HanziCraft for the character

Workflow

I recommend the following workflow: The first time you learn a new word in Anki, you should see the Zh→En+Pin card type. Draw the characters on the outlined quizzes and look up new characters with 📕 to learn about their meaning and composition.
If you get a En→Pin+Zh or Pin→Zh+En card when reviewing cards, try to remember the pinyin or the meaning depending on what is hidden and try to remember the number of characters of the chinese word. Once you have viewed the backside you should try to draw the characters. In the end you should press Again/Hard/Good/Easy depending on how well you remembered, how well you drew the word and how strict you want to be with yourself.

Tips

You should try to learn your cards regularly every day to build proper knowledge. If you happen to have to know lot’s of characters in a few days you can use the custom study functionality to increase the new cards and review cards limits (among other things).
Since the decks were automatically generated there are some unpolished edges. E.g. there are two notes in the PAVC deck with the meaning “(question particle)”. One for 嗎 and the other one for 哪. Therefore two cards of type En→Pin+Zh with identical frontside exist. You probably want to suspend both of those cards (not the notes though).
If you want to learn specific cards not in the order of the deck you can reposition the chosen cards to the beginning.
You also might want to suspend some cards if you don’t fancy e.g. learning cards of type Pin→Zh+En. In that case you can use the search function to filter the cards, select all of them (C-a) and suspend them.
If you accidentally pushed the wrong button while reviewing, you can undo the press by pressing “u” on desktop or the undo button on mobile.
If you want to load balance your reviews depending on the workdays or want to delay some reviews for a few days (e.g. because you are on holidays) you can enable the FSRS scheduler and install the FSRS Helper addon. This new scheduler for Anki should also reduce your workload.

Configuration

If the quiz widgets are too big or too small for your device you can adjust their size by changing the template code of every card’s back: Simply change desktopQuizSize and mobileQuizSize respectively in dconfig to your liking.

Donate

Last but not least Anki is almost completely free but you can help the project by buying Ankimobile.

Thanks

The original decks:
Inspiration for my decks and also helpful resource on how to implement the quizzes: Hello from Anki xiehanzi | Anki xiehanzi
Helpful resource on how to work with raw Anki decks: kerrickstaley/genanki: A Python 3 library for generating Anki decks