Chinese Flashcards: The Best Apps and How SRS Works

沉浸 TeamAugust 16, 20268 min read

Chinese flashcards work when two things are true: the cards come from words you've met in real sentences, and a spaced repetition system (SRS) decides when you see them again. Get those two right and almost any app works. Get them wrong and you'll grind through hundreds of reviews that never survive a real conversation. Here's the short version, then the full guide.

Best all-around power tool: Anki. Free on desktop and Android, endlessly customizable, steep setup. See our full Chinese Anki setup guide.
Best if you're already using a dictionary app: Pleco's flashcard add-on. One tap from lookup to card.
Best if you want cards to come from reading: Chenjin. Tap a word in a story, it becomes a card, and the built-in FSRS scheduler handles the rest. Works with Anki too, if that's your home base.
Skip: anything without true spaced repetition. Cramming the same 50 cards in a loop feels productive and fades in a week.

How SRS works (the reason flashcards work at all)

Your memory of a new word decays on a curve. Right after you learn 复习 (fùxí, to review), you could recall it for a day or two. If you see it again just before you'd forget it, something useful happens: the memory gets stronger, and the next forgetting takes longer.

Spaced repetition software schedules reviews to ride that curve. The rhythm looks like this:

You see a card and grade yourself: forgot it, or got it.
Got it? The card's next review moves further out: 1 day, then 3, then a week, then a month, then several months.
Forgot it? The interval shrinks and the card comes back soon.

The result is that easy words get out of your way and hard words get exactly the attention they need. You're never re-reviewing the 400 words you know cold, which is where most non-SRS study time silently goes.

FSRS vs. the old algorithms

For years most apps used a fixed formula from the 1980s (SM-2, the one classic Anki shipped with). The modern standard is FSRS, a scheduler trained on millions of real review logs that predicts when you will forget this card. In practice it means the same retention from noticeably fewer reviews per day. Anki now includes FSRS as an option in deck settings, and Chenjin's built-in system runs on FSRS out of the box.

What a good Chinese flashcard looks like

Chinese needs a little more from a card than most languages, because a word has three parts to learn: the characters, the sound (with tone), and the meaning.

Front: the characters alone. Seeing 忘记 and recalling "wàngjì, to forget" is the skill you use while reading. Putting pinyin on the front turns the card into a pinyin-reading exercise.
Back: pinyin with tone marks, meaning, and audio. Hearing the word every single review quietly trains your listening for free.
Two directions are better than one. Recognition (characters → meaning) and recall (meaning → characters or speech) are separate skills. Chenjin creates both card types for a word; in Anki you'd add a second card template.
Sentence cards for grammar and feel. A card with a full sentence you've heard, plus its audio, teaches usage in a way single words can't. These matter more as you pass HSK 3.
Context beats isolation. A word you met in a story has a hook: the scene, the sentence, the character who said it. A word from a bare list has nothing to hang onto. This is the strongest argument for mining your own cards from reading practice instead of only downloading decks.

The best Chinese flashcard apps, honestly ranked

1. Anki: the power tool

Free on desktop and Android (the iOS app is a one-time purchase), infinitely customizable, with shared decks for every HSK level and add-ons for audio and stats. The cost is setup time and a learning curve that has ended many a study streak in week one. If you're willing to invest an afternoon, it's the strongest pure flashcard system there is. We wrote a full Chinese Anki setup guide that gets you from zero to a working deck, and covers when Anki is the wrong choice.

2. Pleco: flashcards inside the dictionary

Pleco is the dictionary app most serious learners carry, and its paid flashcard add-on lets you turn any lookup into a card instantly. The scheduler is solid and the character detail is excellent. It's the best pick if your phone dictionary is already the center of your workflow. The cards stay isolated words, though, so you'll still want sentences from somewhere.

3. Chenjin: cards that come from what you read

Full disclosure: this is us. Chenjin is built around graded stories, and the flashcard system is wired directly into them. Tap any word while reading and it's one tap to a card; select a whole phrase and it becomes a sentence card with a translation. Reviews run on FSRS, audio is on every card, and a free account includes up to 15 new cards a day. If you'd rather keep Anki as your review home, Chenjin can send every card you make straight into your Anki deck instead (covered in the Anki guide).

4. Hack Chinese: managed vocabulary lists

A subscription web app focused purely on Chinese vocabulary, with clean HSK and textbook lists and a low-friction review flow. Good if you want zero setup and don't mind that it's vocabulary-only, with no reading or listening attached.

5. Skritter: for handwriting

Skritter's whole reason to exist is writing characters by hand with stroke-order feedback, on an SRS schedule. If handwriting matters to your goals (exams, calligraphy, or just liking it), it's the specialist tool. If not, it's solving a problem you may not have. For occasional writing practice, our free printable practice sheets cover the basics.

6. Quizlet and friends: fine for a quiz, not for retention

General flashcard sites are easy to start and fine for tomorrow's vocab quiz. But most don't run true spaced repetition, their user-made Chinese decks are full of tone and pinyin errors, and there's no audio you can trust. For a language you'll study for years, scheduling is the whole game. Use a real SRS.

Chinese words flashcards: where to get ready-made decks

You don't have to build everything yourself. Ready-made Chinese words flashcards are a fine way to cover the high-frequency core, especially at the start:

HSK decks. The HSK word lists are the standard sequence almost every deck follows. Start with HSK 1 vocabulary and work up; our HSK levels guide explains what each level covers.
Frequency decks. Decks ordered by how often words appear in real text. Similar idea, slightly better ordering for readers.
Sentence decks. Collections like the well-known "SpoonFed Chinese" Anki deck give you thousands of graded sentences with audio.

One honest warning: premade decks are scaffolding, not the building. Learners who only drill downloaded word lists tend to plateau, because they're memorizing labels without input. The fix is simple: read and listen daily, and let at least half your new cards come from words you met in context. That's the core of the immersion-first roadmap.

A daily routine that won't burn you out

Cap new cards at 10 to 15 a day. Every new card creates future reviews. 20+ new cards a day feels great for two weeks, then buries you.
Do reviews first, every day. Ten minutes daily beats an hour on Sunday. The schedule only works if you show up when the cards are due.
Grade honestly. "I'd have gotten it eventually" is a fail. The algorithm can only help you if you tell it the truth.
Delete without guilt. A card that keeps failing for weeks is a bad card, not a moral failing. Delete it; if the word matters you'll meet it again in reading.
Say the word out loud on every review, tones included. It's free pronunciation practice, and it makes the memory motor, not just visual.

Frequently asked questions

Are flashcards enough to learn Chinese?

No. Flashcards keep words from leaking out of your memory; they don't teach you to understand speech or follow a paragraph. The winning combination is daily input (reading and listening) plus SRS to lock in what the input gives you. Cards are the net, not the fish.

How many Chinese flashcards should I do a day?

10 to 15 new cards a day is sustainable for most people and compounds to thousands of words a year. Your daily review count will settle at a level that tracks your new-card rate, so if reviews start eating your study time, lower new cards before you lower your standards.

Are paper flashcards good for Chinese?

They're better than nothing and worse than software. Paper can't schedule reviews, play audio, or track which of 2,000 cards you're about to forget. If you love the ritual, keep a small paper deck for your current 50 hardest words and let an app carry the rest.

Should beginners use sentence cards or word cards?

Start with word cards for the first few hundred words; you need a base vocabulary before sentences are readable. From around HSK 2 onward, start mixing in sentence cards for words whose usage confuses you. By HSK 4 many learners run half and half.

Want to feel the reading-to-flashcard loop? Create a free Chenjin account, open a graded story, and tap any word you don't know. It's a card with audio before you've finished the paragraph, and the free plan includes 15 new cards a day.