My anki decks for learning chinese

EDITED: Updated article to the rewrite.

In the autumn of 2024 I went to Taiwan to study abroad for one semester. To learn chinese vocabulary I was and am still using the FLOSS digital flashcard application Anki.
Thankfully there were already shared decks available for all of the textbooks of my chinese courses.
Sadly some of them use simplified characters, wherefore I started a small project to convert the characters to traditional ones. The project expanded over time, and eventually, I added audio (with Google TTS), quizzes for the characters, links to dictionaries, example sentences (with LLMs) as well as pinyin for the decks lacking it.

The decks

The decks can be downloaded from the following links:

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

After importing the decks I highly recommend enabling the following 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

Each note has three cards:

  • Zh→Mn+Pin: Chinese characters on the front, pinyin and the corresponding meaning in English or German on the back
  • Mn→Pin+Zh: Meaning on the front, pinyin and characters on the back
  • Pin→Zh+Mn: Pinyin on the front, characters and meaning on the back

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→Mn+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 Mn→Pin+Zh and Pin→Zh+Mn have the same quiz but without an outline.
Furthermore the characters in the quizzes are colored according to their tone in the given word, apart from the radical of the character, which is colored in dark green.


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 website HanziCraft for this character.
  • 📘 Opens Pleco on mobile and otherwise MDBG for the whole world.

Workflow

I recommend the following workflow: The first time you learn a new word in Anki, you should see the Zh→Mn+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 Mn→Pin+Zh or Pin→Zh+Mn 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 want to learn lot’s of characters in only a few days you can use the custom study option 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 Mn→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 and not in the order of the deck you can reposition the chosen cards to the beginning.
  • You might also want to suspend some cards if you don’t want to learn e.g. cards of type Pin→Zh+Mn. 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 code of the mediafile $DECKNAME_config.js: Simply change quizSize and quizSize respectively in the variable dconfigPlt.
The config file also has some options regarding the coloring of the tones and the leniency of the quizzes.

Updating

If you have used the previous decks and want to update to the newer ones you can either use the python scripts in my repository or do the transition by hand:
Before import you need to change the names of the cards of all note types from e.g. En→Pin+Zh to Mn→Pin+Zh.
Then you can import the new deck (using “Merge note types” during import). The should decks now work as intended, but some of the notes might have superfluous fields, which I recommend removing.

You can support this project indirectly by supporting Anki. You can e.g. buy Ankimobile.

See also

Thanks

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