If you've been studying Mandarin for more than a few weeks, someone has told you to use Anki. And they're not wrong — Anki is a genuinely powerful tool. But every few months, the same debate surfaces in language-learning communities: should you use Anki or a dedicated Chinese learning app?
Having used both extensively, here is an honest breakdown.
What Anki Does Well
Anki is free (on desktop and Android), open-source, and almost infinitely customizable. Those are real advantages, not marketing fluff.
The spaced repetition algorithm works. Anki's scheduler has been refined over many years. It surfaces cards right before you're likely to forget them, which is the most efficient way to move vocabulary into long-term memory. The SM-2 algorithm (and FSRS, the newer alternative) is well-researched and effective.
Community decks are a massive resource. There are pre-built Anki decks for every HSK level, for the most common 5,000 characters, for sentence mining from textbooks, for radicals, for tone pairs — you name it. Someone has probably built it. For a self-directed learner, this library is invaluable.
You own your data. Your progress, your cards, your scheduling data — it's all local. No subscription. No company shutting down and taking your study history with it. For learners who plan to study for years (as Mandarin requires), this matters.
Custom card types let you test exactly what you want. You can build cards that show a character and test tone recall. Cards that play audio and test character recognition. Cards with cloze-deleted sentences for grammar. If you can imagine it, you can build it. This flexibility is Anki's superpower.
Where Anki Falls Short for Chinese
Here's the thing: Anki is a flashcard engine. It's an extraordinarily good flashcard engine, but flashcards are one study modality, and Mandarin demands several.
No listening practice. You can add audio to cards, but it's not the same as listening comprehension training. Hearing a single word pronounced clearly on a flashcard is fundamentally different from parsing that word in a spoken sentence at natural speed. Anki doesn't do passage-level listening, speed adjustment, or dialogue practice.
No speaking or tone training. Anki can't hear you. It can't tell you that your second tone is drifting flat or that your third tone isn't dipping low enough. For a tonal language, this is a significant gap.
No reading in context. Flashcards strip words from their context by design. You might know 方便 means "convenient" from your Anki reviews, but can you parse it in a paragraph about travel logistics where it appears alongside five other words you sort of know? Reading comprehension is a different skill from card recall, and Anki doesn't train it.
No curriculum structure. Anki doesn't know what order you should learn things in. It doesn't know that you should learn 在 before 正在...呢, or that 把 sentences require a certain foundation. You either follow someone else's deck ordering (and hope they got it right) or you impose structure yourself. Most learners don't, and their knowledge ends up with strange gaps.
The deck-building tax. This is the one people underestimate. Building and maintaining good Anki cards takes real time. Formatting cards well, adding audio, writing example sentences, tagging by grammar point or HSK level — this is work that compounds. Many learners spend more time building their study system than actually studying. It does not feel like procrastination because it looks productive, but it is.
What Dedicated Chinese Apps Offer
Apps built specifically for Mandarin can integrate things that Anki cannot:
Multiple drill types in one system. Vocabulary recall, listening comprehension, tone discrimination, reading passages, grammar exercises, sentence construction — these can all feed the same spaced repetition scheduler. A word you miss in a listening drill and a word you miss in a flashcard review are the same gap, and the system can treat them that way.
Graded reading with inline glosses. You read a passage at your level, tap a word you don't know, and that word automatically enters your review queue. This "cleanup loop" — where real reading surfaces real gaps that become real drills — is extremely efficient. It's hard to replicate in Anki without a lot of manual work.
Structured progression. A dedicated app can enforce prerequisite knowledge, introduce grammar in a sensible order, and make sure you're not attempting material you don't have the foundation for. This isn't hand-holding — it's curriculum design, and it matters.
Listening at adjustable speed. Start at 0.75x, work up to 1.0x, push yourself at 1.25x. This kind of graduated listening difficulty is simple to implement in a dedicated app and nearly impossible in Anki.
Diagnostics. Where exactly are you weak? Is it vocabulary breadth? Tone accuracy? Reading speed? Grammar patterns? A purpose-built system can measure these dimensions and direct you to your actual weak spots. Anki can tell you your retention rate on a deck, but it can't tell you whether your listening comprehension is lagging behind your reading comprehension.
The Real Trade-Off: Flexibility vs. Friction
The honest framing isn't "Anki is good" or "apps are good." It's a trade-off between flexibility and friction.
Anki gives you maximum flexibility. You can study exactly what you want, exactly how you want, with complete control over every parameter. The cost is friction — you spend time building, organizing, and maintaining your study system.
Dedicated apps reduce friction. You open the app and study. The cost is less control — you're working within someone else's system, and if that system doesn't match your needs, you're stuck.
The question is which cost matters more to you.
Who Should Use Anki
Anki is the right choice if you:
- Enjoy building and tweaking systems (and can be honest about when tweaking becomes procrastination)
- Already have a curriculum from a class, tutor, or textbook and just need the SRS engine
- Want to do sentence mining from native content you encounter in the wild
- Are at an advanced level where no app covers your specific needs
- Are on a tight budget and need a completely free solution
Anki is a power tool. In the hands of a disciplined, self-directed learner who already has a study plan, it's extremely effective.
Who Should Use a Dedicated App
A dedicated app is the right choice if you:
- Want to study, not build a study system
- Need listening and speaking practice integrated with vocabulary review
- Don't have a curriculum and want structured HSK-aligned progression
- Have trouble identifying your weak spots and want the system to surface them
- Find yourself spending more time configuring Anki than using it
There's no shame in this. A tool that you actually use every day beats a theoretically perfect system that you spend all your time configuring.
The Honest Answer: Many Serious Learners Use Both
Here is what actually happens among the most effective Mandarin learners: they use a dedicated app for structured daily practice — vocabulary, listening, grammar drills, reading — and they keep an Anki deck on the side for sentence mining from native content. The app handles the curriculum; Anki handles the overflow.
This isn't because either tool is inadequate. It's because learning a language as complex as Mandarin genuinely benefits from multiple approaches. The app gives you structure and coverage. Anki gives you a place to capture and retain the random, wonderful, specific things you encounter outside of any curriculum — the slang your language partner uses, the phrase from that show you're watching, the sign you saw in a photo that made you laugh.
The worst approach is spending weeks agonizing over which tool to use instead of studying. Pick one, start, and adjust as you go.
Aelu was built as an SRS system designed specifically for Chinese — one that combines vocabulary drilling with graded reading, listening practice at adjustable speeds, tone grading, and real diagnostics that tell you where you are weak. It is $14.99/month, and HSK 1-2 content is free if you want to try it. But if Anki is working for you, keep using Anki. The best tool is the one that gets you studying every day.