Karl Baker is a Mandarin learner, app developer, and regular contributor to I’m Learning Mandarin. In this post, he delves into the Spaced Repetition flashcard app Anki and assesses whether Anki really is, as some say, the best app to learn Mandarin.
Table of Contents:
- Introduction: Discovering Anki
- Is Anki The Best App to Learn Mandarin for: Customisability?
- Is Anki The Best App to Learn Mandarin for: Spaced Repetition?
- Is Anki The Best App to Learn Mandarin for: Availablity
- Is Anki The Best App to Learn Mandarin for: Community and Add-Ons?
- Is Anki The Best App to Learn Mandarin for: Statistics and Progress Tracking?
- My Verdict
- Interested in using flashcards for learning Chinese?
Introduction: Discovering Anki and Sentence Mining
I first started learning Mandarin 4 years ago to communicate with my Chinese wife’s family. The complex characters, tones, and the sheer volume of new vocabulary seemed daunting. I embarked on a quest to find the best app to learn Mandarin and discovered a few different flashcard apps which I used to learn new words and characters.
Several friends I met in the process, who were avid language learners themselves, kept talking about one flashcard app in particular, called Anki. They raved about how it transformed their learning process – whether it was for training themselves to master the tones of the Chinese language or memorising words like how to say Hello in Chinese. And they swore it was the best app to learn Mandarin.
I was skeptical. When I first tried it out, it seemed very clunky to make your own flashcards and the user experience was not great, to put it mildly. I put the app to one side.
But as the years passed, I became more immersed in the language. I travelled to China several times, met my wife’s family, and developed a need to hold progressively longer conversations with native speakers on these trips.
I became frustrated and impatient with my progress, wondering if I would ever learn enough Chinese to become conversational with this lifetime. After researching: how long does it take to learn Mandarin? I came across an effective method that promised to enable me to communicate better with my extended family in China within months.
The method was called: sentence mining.
The idea was simple: instead of memorizing isolated words, you learn entire sentences, understanding vocabulary in context, and picking up natural grammar patterns along the way.
Using, this guide to sentence mining, I started jotting down sentences from everything I read and heard, collecting them in the notes app on my phone and spreadsheets on my laptop. However, managing these sentences soon became overwhelming. Remembering where I had written them down, how often I had reviewed them, and ensuring I didn’t miss any revisions turned into a logistical nightmare.
Reluctantly, I decided to give Anki another try. I downloaded the app, input my sentences, and set up a daily review schedule. To my surprise, Anki’s spaced repetition system worked pretty well.
It presented sentences just as I was about to forget them, reinforcing my memory at the perfect intervals. The app’s flexibility allowed me to add audio, images, and even personal notes, making each card more engaging and memorable.
I discovered that, if used correctly, Anki can really speed up your learning.
But how useful is it for Chinese learners? And is it really, as some say, the best app to learn Mandarin?
In this post, I’ll go through five of Anki’s main selling points and assess how well it actually performs for each one.
Is Anki The Best App to Learn Mandarin for: Customisability?
One of the most helpful activities I did while in China for my Chinese learning was to prepare conversations in advance. I would often go out on my own and undertake various errands that required intermediate-level vocabulary like buying a mobile phone contract or signing up for a gym membership.
Before I undertook these activities I would study the vocabulary required and try to think of any relevant sentences that might come up. I would then make my own sentence decks and study them in advance. This way, the conversations would flow a lot more smoothly than if I tried to come up with the sentences on the fly.
Anki enables users to create their own decks or download from a vast library of shared decks tailored to specific languages and proficiency levels. In his guide to sentence mining, I’m Learning Mandarin editor, Mischa, stresses that gathering your own sentences while sentence mining and making flashcards that are relevant to you is very important, so this amount of customisability is one of Anki’s main appeals.
The flashcards are highly customisable, allowing users to add images, audio, and text to their cards, making the learning process more engaging and personalised. However, the shared decks available online have very varying levels of quality. There are an assortment of decks with or without images, with native speaker audio or computer-generated audio, and with or without “cloze tests” (fill-in-the-blank questions designed to help users memorize information by actively recalling the missing parts of a sentence). So shared decks are often a gamble on what you might get.
Is Anki The Best App to Learn Mandarin for: Spaced Repetition?
Anki’s spaced repetition algorithm is designed to show you cards just as you’re about to forget them, reinforcing memory at the perfect intervals to optimise your study time. Anki allows users to adjust the intervals between reviews. This is beneficial because it lets users tailor their study sessions to their personal learning pace and retention capabilities. For instance, users can shorten intervals for more difficult material and extend them for content they find easier.
New users might find the number of settings configurable for the spaced repetition algorithm in Anki somewhat overwhelming initially. However, the default settings are usually adequate for beginners.
The effectiveness of the spaced repetition algorithm relies heavily on consistent usage. Users need to review their cards regularly to get the full benefits. Irregular use can disrupt the spacing intervals and reduce the algorithm’s efficacy, so the application may not be as effective for those with busy lifestyles who use it on an ad-hoc basis.
For users with a large volume of flashcards, the algorithm can sometimes schedule a high number of reviews in a single day, which can be overwhelming. Proper deck management and setting realistic daily limits can mitigate this issue.
Although the tracking of individual cards is managed well by the SRS algorithm, when studying sentences as flashcards, Anki doesn’t keep track of which words within those sentences you know. This lack of vocabulary tracking makes it less efficient for sentence mining as you may be overwhelmed by sentences with too many new words. Anki has no way of adapting the new cards it shows you to your vocabulary level.
Users also have to self-assess their memory of the answer, using the levels between hard and easy. However, my personal gripe with this method is that my mind can wander and I can click the buttons without actually paying attention. I would find a more active method of testing your memory with the software assessing your answers to be beneficial.
Is Anki The Best App to Learn Mandarin for: Availablity
Anki is available on all major desktop platforms, Android and iPhone. This ensures that users can create, edit, and review their flashcards regardless of their computer’s operating system.
The desktop versions provide the most comprehensive set of features, including advanced customization options, add-ons, and plugins.
The mobile apps offer a more limited set of features but still support all core functionality for studying and reviewing cards. They also allow offline use for times when your phone doesn’t have signal or data, but sync your progress seamlessly with the desktop versions once connectivity is restored.
The iPhone version is a paid app, which might be a deterrent for some users. However, the one-time purchase cost is often considered worth it by those who use Anki extensively.
Is Anki The Best App to Learn Mandarin for: Community and Add-Ons?
Anki’s flexibility and power are significantly enhanced by the availability of numerous community-created add-ons. We’ll explore here the main add-ons that are useful for learning Chinese.
AwesomeTTS integrates text-to-speech capabilities into Anki, allowing users to generate audio for their flashcards automatically. This is great for pronunciation and listening practice. It supports multiple languages and voices but the quality of generated speech can vary depending on the text-to-speech engine used. Some text-to-speech services require internet access.
Advanced Browser enhances Anki’s built-in deck browser, providing advanced search and filter options, and additional fields for sorting and categorising cards. This is extremely useful for managing large decks and complex databases. The ability to perform sophisticated searches and filters makes organizing and studying cards more efficient. However, the complex interface can be overwhelming for beginners.
Pop-up Dictionary allows users to get instant definitions of words within their flashcards by hovering over them or clicking on them. This saves time by providing quick access to definitions and translations without leaving Anki. The quality and availability of definitions depend on the sources integrated with the add-on.
Is Anki The Best App to Learn Mandarin for: Statistics and Progress Tracking?
Anki includes a suite of built-in statistics and progress-tracking tools that help users monitor their learning progress. These include:
Review Overview
The Review Overview provides a snapshot of your daily study activity, showing the number of cards reviewed, new cards introduced, and cards due for review. It’s particularly useful for ensuring consistent daily practice but the summary is fairly basic.
Card Counts
Card Counts show the distribution of cards across different states: New, Learning, Review, and Lapsed. This helps users understand their workload and track how many cards are in each stage of the learning process. It allows users to balance learning new cards with reviews of older ones.
Retention Graph
The Retention Graph illustrates the percentage of correct answers over different intervals, showing how well information is being retained over time. This graph is critical for assessing the long-term effectiveness of your study habits and making necessary adjustments.
Forecast
The Forecast feature shows the number of cards due for review in the upcoming days, helping users plan their study sessions and avoid overwhelming review numbers by allowing them to plan ahead.
Review Heatmap Plugin The Review Heatmap plugin adds a visual heatmap to show the frequency and consistency of your study sessions over time.
Is Anki the Best App to Learn Mandarin: Final Verdict
So is Anki the best app to learn Mandarin?
Well, in summary, Anki is a robust, customizable, and efficient tool for spaced repetition learning. Its extensive cross-platform availability, powerful statistics, and progress-tracking functions make it a great choice for a wide range of learners.
So I would say, taking into account the fact that there is no single best app to learn Mandarin, given that Anki is free, it certainly has a claim to being one of the best apps to learn Mandarin and perhaps the best free app to learn Mandarin.
The user interface is very basic and some parts of its settings can be quite complex. This was offputting for me to begin with, but once I had a strong need and motivation to use the software for a particular purpose, I quickly figured out how to use it.
The flexibility of being able to make your own decks can be very useful if you know what you’re doing. I spent a long time making large decks of my own with many notes. The flexibility of being able to add your own images, notes and audio to cards made them more meaningful for me and really improved my retention.
I took advantage of it’s cross platform availability by downloading the Android and desktop app. The desktop app is useful for making decks with more advanced functionality, while the Android app I find great for reviewing flashcards when I’m out and about and have some spare time.
I also installed some add-ons such as the Advanced Browser. I like to use this for its advanced search capabilities. Searching within the decks I already have for specific new words or grammar structures I want to learn can be useful to create new targeted decks from the existing decks I already have.
I found the lack of vocabulary tracking made it quite inefficient for sentence mining, as the new sentences shown were not tailored to my existing knowledge base. I liked to download shared decks online, but often these were filled with a mix of sentences beyond my vocabulary level and so were not as useful.
In short, like all apps, Anki is not perfect and has its drawbacks. Whatever your goals, it must be used in combination with other methods, such as reading Mandarin Chinese graded readers and having conversations with native speakers.
But if used well, and if you can get over the clunky interface, it’s an excellent sentence mining tool which will boost your studies.
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