If you spend any time around serious language learners, Anki comes up fast. It has a near-cult following, and honestly it earns most of it. I used it for a long stretch when I was learning Chinese, built my own decks, fiddled with the settings far more than I should have, and leaned on it hard for the better part of a year.

So this isn't a hit piece. Anki is a great piece of software. It's also, for most beginners, the wrong first tool. Both of those can be true, and the space between them is what I want to get at.

What Anki actually is

The thing to get straight first is what Anki isn't. It isn't a Chinese course. It's a spaced repetition engine, and that's the whole of it.

Spaced repetition, if the term is new to you, just means reviewing something right before you'd naturally forget it, then pushing the gap a little wider each time you get it right. It's the most efficient way anyone has found to get things to stick, and it's the same idea I keep circling back to in what actually makes characters stick. Anki nails this part. You make a card, you say how well you knew it, and it works out when to put that card back in front of you. That's the engine, and the engine is excellent.

What it doesn't hand you is anything to put on the cards. It gives you a blank, very powerful machine and then leaves the room. What you learn, the order you learn it in, how each card is even built, all of that is on you.

What Anki does brilliantly

I don't want to undersell the good parts, because they're real.

It's free. Desktop on Windows, Mac and Linux costs nothing, the web version is free, Android is free. The one exception is the iPhone app, a one-off payment of around 25 US dollars that basically bankrolls the whole project. For software this good, that's close to a gift.

Then there's the customization, which is bottomless. Custom card layouts, tone colours, embedded audio, stroke order diagrams, add-ons for almost anything, and you can even tweak the scheduling algorithm itself if you're that sort of person. If you can picture a way to study something, you can build it in Anki.

And it comes everywhere with you. Syncs across devices, works on a plane with no signal, and it's been around so long that whatever obscure problem you hit, someone already solved it on a forum years ago.

For an advanced learner who already knows exactly what they want to drill, it's hard to beat. That's who it was made for.

The catch, and it's a big one

Here's the trade. The same open-endedness that makes Anki so powerful is exactly what makes it rough on a beginner.

You sit down to learn Chinese and you're looking at a blank screen. Now you have to answer a stack of questions you've got no way of answering yet. Which characters first? How many a day? Should the card test the meaning, the reading, or both? A separate card for handwriting? What even makes a card good?

None of those are trivial. The order you meet characters in matters a lot, because characters are built out of reused parts, and meeting the parts first is the thing that turns blind memorization into actual recognition. That's the whole argument in radicals and components. Anki holds no opinion on any of it. It'll cheerfully throw a nightmare character at you on day one and a dead-simple one on day fifty. The curriculum is something you're expected to walk in with. And the trap inside the trap is that if you already knew enough to build a good one, you wouldn't be reaching for a beginner tool in the first place.

The Chinese-specific bit nobody warns you about

Chinese makes the blank-card problem worse than it'd be for, say, French nouns.

A decent Chinese card isn't a word and its translation. To really learn a character you want the character, its pinyin with the tone marks, the meaning, ideally audio so the tone goes in through your ears and not just your eyes, and, if you ever mean to write by hand, the stroke order on top of that. Now build all of that, by hand, a few thousand times over. Most people who go this way burn out on making the deck long before the deck could ever pay them back.

"Just download a deck"

This is the usual comeback, and it's a fair one. You don't have to build anything. There are big shared Chinese decks, HSK decks, sentence decks like the well-known Spoonfed Chinese, loads of them. Grab one and go.

It helps. It doesn't fix the actual problem though, and it's worth being straight about why.

The order is still whatever the deck's author picked, which is usually just HSK order or raw frequency order, not an order where each character leans on parts you've already seen. Quality is all over the map, and as a beginner you can't really tell a good deck from a bad one until you've already sunk a few weeks into it. Plenty test the wrong thing, or only test one direction. And the deeper issue is that a downloaded deck has no gating whatsoever. Nothing stops a hard character turning up before the simpler pieces it's made from, because as far as Anki is concerned there are no pieces. Just a flat pile of unrelated cards.

Then there's the leech problem. When you keep failing the same card, Anki tags it as a "leech" and, depending on your settings, suspends it outright and stops showing it to you. Which is fair enough on its own terms. But it treats that card in isolation, with no way of knowing that the reason 骂 won't stick is that you never really nailed 马 underneath it first. It flags the symptom. It can't see the cause.

So who is Anki genuinely right for?

If you're already intermediate or advanced, you've got a feel for what you need to drill, and you'd rather have total control than convenience, use Anki. It's also brilliant as a second tool, a place to dump the specific words you keep tripping over in the wild and want to pin down for good. For mining vocabulary out of shows, books and conversations, nothing really touches it.

Where it falls down is as a first tool.

A beginner who wants to read Chinese, and who didn't sign up to also be a flashcard designer and a curriculum planner, is being asked for the exact two things they're least able to give: a plan, and the judgement to build good cards. The way I've come to think of it, handing a beginner Anki is like handing someone a full professional kitchen when what they asked for was dinner. Everything they could possibly need is in the room. That was never the hard part.

What I use instead, and why it exists

This is the gap Hanzi Express was built to close, and yes, it's the thing I make, so read the rest with that in mind.

The spaced repetition isn't the difference. Anki's SRS is great and ours runs on the same idea. The difference is all the stuff Anki leaves blank on purpose. Hanzi Express picks the order for you: a component, then the characters built from that component, then the words built from those characters, so nothing shows up before the parts it depends on. The cards are already made, character, pinyin, tone, meaning, audio, stroke order, all of it done, so there's no deck to grind out before you can even start. Answers get checked by AI, which means a correct synonym is accepted instead of marked wrong for not matching some deck author's exact wording. And because the whole order is built around how characters are made of parts, by the time a tricky character turns up you've already met and drilled the pieces it's built from, rather than running into it cold. If that shape sounds familiar, it's the same reasoning behind the Chinese answer to WaniKani.

None of that makes Anki bad. It just makes it a different kind of tool. Anki gives you a superb engine and trusts you to build the car around it. Hanzi Express is the car, with the engine already in it.

The honest bottom line

If you like tinkering, you know roughly what you're doing, and you want the controls in your own hands, use Anki. It's one of the best pieces of learning software ever made and I'm not going to pretend otherwise.

But if you're just starting, and what actually appeals about Anki is the spaced repetition and not the evening you'll lose to building cards, you can get the memory science without the blank screen. The first three levels of Hanzi Express are free, no card needed, so it costs you nothing to feel the gap between an engine you have to assemble and a path that's already laid out.

And if you've ever sat in front of an empty Anki deck late at night wondering where on earth to even begin, well. That feeling is the whole reason this exists.

Anki for Learning Chinese: Does It Actually Work? (An Honest Take)