Decks and prices checked: October 2026
The best Anki deck for Chinese depends on why you are learning. For the HSK exam, use a deck built on the official word list: the free HSK 2.0 deck (4,995 words) or the New HSK 3.0 deck (11,042 notes across nine levels). For speaking and listening, Spoonfed Chinese is the strongest pre-made option, with over 8,000 audio sentences that add one or two new words at a time.
Most Chinese learners who quit Anki do so for the same reason: they downloaded a 5,000-word deck, added 30 cards a day, and drowned in reviews by week three. Chinese is slow per card. Each word carries a character form, a pinyin reading with tones, and a meaning, and many words share characters that look nearly identical to a beginner. Picking the right deck, and only one or two of them, matters more here than in Spanish or French.
This page compares the decks people actually use, with card counts taken from AnkiWeb and the publishers' own pages. If you want the setup side (note types, sentence mining, daily settings), our guide on how to use Anki for learning Chinese covers that in detail.
Spoonfed Chinese is a sentence deck. Each card shows a short Mandarin sentence with the characters, pinyin, an English translation and a native speaker recording. Sentences are ordered so that each one introduces only one or two new words, which is the "i+1" idea in practice: you always understand most of what you are reading. The creator sells it on Gumroad as a pay-what-you-want deck with a minimum of a few dollars, in simplified and traditional versions, and describes it as over 8,000 sentences. Copies also circulate on AnkiWeb (one has 7,335 notes, last updated April 2024), but the Gumroad version is the maintained original.
Best for: learners who want to understand spoken and written Mandarin rather than pass a specific test. Weakness: it is not ordered by HSK level, so it won't map neatly onto an exam syllabus.
The Hanyu Shuiping Kaoshi (HSK) deck on AnkiWeb has 4,995 notes covering every word on the six-level HSK 2.0 list, with simplified and traditional characters, pinyin, English and measure words. It has no audio and was last updated in 2016, which is its main limitation. If you add one deck to cover the full 2.0 syllabus and supply your own listening practice elsewhere, this is a clean, accurate base. Level tags let you study HSK 1 to 3 first and unlock the rest later.
The newer HSK 3.0 standard uses nine levels and a much larger vocabulary. The free New HSK 3.0 Mandarin Chinese deck covers all nine levels in 11,042 notes, with audio and a card type that lets you draw characters stroke by stroke in Anki desktop, AnkiDroid and AnkiMobile. It was last updated in January 2025. The same author's earlier HSK 3.0 drawing deck is nearly identical; pick the newer one.
Best for: anyone sitting an HSK 3.0 based exam, or learners who want handwriting practice. Weakness: 11,000 notes is a multi-year commitment. Suspend everything above your target level on day one.
Refold's Fundamental Vocabulary to Learn Mandarin Chinese is a paid 1,000-word deck with custom example sentences, consistent audio for every word and sentence, and an image per card, in simplified characters with pinyin. The one-time Anki download costs $24.99, or you can study it online with a $9/month Refold subscription (prices checked October 2026). It is designed to be finished in a few months and then replaced by sentence mining from real content.
The Remembering Simplified Hanzi 1 deck (1,500 notes, updated February 2024) follows James Heisig's method: learn each character's components and an English keyword through a mnemonic story, before you learn its reading. It works well alongside the book. It is a character deck, not a vocabulary deck, so it teaches you to recognize and write 1,500 characters without teaching you how to say them. Many learners find that trade-off too slow; others find it is the only thing that stops similar characters blurring together.
The Chinese Grammar (汉语 语法) HSK1 - HSK 6 deck has 4,816 notes of grammar patterns with example sentences, organized by HSK level. Use it as a reference deck for the patterns your course or reading keeps throwing at you, not as something to work through front to back.
| Deck | Size | Audio | Price | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Spoonfed Chinese | 8,000+ sentences | Native speaker | Pay what you want | Listening and real usage |
| HSK 2.0 (all 5,000 words) | 4,995 notes | None | Free | HSK 2.0 exam syllabus |
| New HSK 3.0 with drawing | 11,042 notes | Yes | Free | HSK 3.0, handwriting |
| Refold ZH1K | 1,000 words | Yes, every word and sentence | $24.99 once | A polished first 1,000 words |
| Heisig RSH 1 | 1,500 notes | No | Free (book sold separately) | Character recognition and writing |
| Chinese Grammar HSK 1 to 6 | 4,816 notes | No | Free | Grammar pattern reference |
Sizes are from each deck's AnkiWeb or publisher page in October 2026. A "note" can produce more than one card, for example a recognition card and a recall card for the same word.
This is the question that trips up most people searching for an HSK Anki deck. The older HSK 2.0 standard has six levels and about 5,000 words. The newer HSK 3.0 standard has nine levels and roughly twice the vocabulary, which is why the 3.0 deck above has 11,042 notes against 4,995 for the 2.0 deck. The word lists overlap heavily at the low levels but are not identical, and the level boundaries are different.
The rule is simple: match the deck to the exam you will actually sit. Check the version on your test center's registration page, not on a blog. If you have no exam planned, the level numbers don't matter much. Use the HSK lists as a rough difficulty ladder, or skip them and learn from sentences instead.
For your first 1,000 to 2,000 words, a pre-made deck is the right call. The most common words are the same for everyone, and a deck with native audio and checked translations saves you dozens of hours of card making. Building your own beginner deck mostly produces cards with typos and missing tones.
That changes once you are reading graded readers, following a textbook or taking a class. From then on, the words you need are the ones on your page, not the ones a stranger picked. A shared deck will keep feeding you words you have no context for while the vocabulary from your actual lessons goes unreviewed. At that point:
This matches what the research on spacing predicts: material you review on a spaced schedule sticks far better than material you cram, but only if the material is what you will be tested or need to use on. Our spaced repetition statistics page has the numbers from the major reviews.
Whether you edit a shared deck or build your own, Chinese cards work best when each one tests a single thing. A card that asks for the character, pinyin, tones and meaning all at once gets marked "Hard" every time and never settles. Split them:
For characters that look alike (人 and 入, 未 and 末, 已 and 己), make one comparison card that shows both and asks what separates them. Exams and real reading exploit exactly those pairs. Color-coding pinyin by tone, which the HSK 3.0 drawing deck does by default, also helps. You start to see tone patterns across words instead of memorizing each one blind.
Start with 10 to 15 new cards a day. That sounds low, but a Chinese word typically produces two or three cards (recognition, listening, sometimes production), and each one takes longer to answer honestly than a European language card. Turn on FSRS, set your maximum reviews high enough that you never hide a backlog, and do your reviews before you add new cards. Our Anki settings for language learning guide and the general Anki settings guide cover the details.
Related guides: Anki decks for Japanese, Anki decks for Korean and the best flashcard app for Chinese. For every subject we cover, see the Anki decks guide.
StudyCards AI is not a replacement for Spoonfed or an HSK deck at the beginner stage. Where it helps is the step after: when you are working through a textbook or taking a class and want the vocabulary and grammar from those specific chapters as cards. Upload the chapter or handout as a PDF and you get question and cloze cards you can download as an Anki .apkg file. Check the readings and add audio before you study them, as you would with any card you didn't write yourself.
Try StudyCards AI FreeFor most beginners, Spoonfed Chinese is the best single deck because every card is a short sentence with native audio, introducing one or two new words at a time. Pair it with an HSK word list deck if you are preparing for the HSK exam, since Spoonfed is not ordered by HSK level.
Yes. The free New HSK 3.0 Mandarin Chinese deck on AnkiWeb covers levels 1 to 9 with 11,042 notes, audio and stroke drawing practice, and was last updated in January 2025. Use the level tags to study only the band you need.
Use an HSK deck if you have an HSK exam date, because the test is built on its official word list. If you are learning for conversation or media, a sentence or frequency deck gets you to useful Chinese faster, since HSK lists include some exam vocabulary you will rarely hear.
Ten to fifteen new cards a day is sustainable for most learners. Chinese cards take longer to review than European language cards because each word has characters, tones and meaning to recall, so reviews pile up faster than new learners expect.
Only if writing by hand matters for your goals or exam. Recognition cards (character to meaning and sound) are enough for reading and typing with pinyin. If you do want handwriting, the HSK 3.0 drawing deck lets you practice stroke order directly in Anki.
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