If you’ve studied Mandarin for more than a few months, there’s a good chance you’ve tried Anki for Chinese. Maybe you still use it. Spaced repetition is one of the few things in language learning that really works: review something just before you forget it, and it sticks.
So why do so many people with thousands of cards in their deck still freeze when they try to say a simple sentence?
Over the years I’ve tried a ton of spaced repitition apps and found the same problems coming up over and over again. The Fluency Trainer started as my attempt to fix that, it’s now my go-to for training Mandarin speaking. It keeps what works about flashcards, and changes the parts that hold speaking back.
Here are the five most common problems with using Anki for Chinese, and how the Fluency Trainer, a speaking-first flashcard app, deals with each one.
1. Anki trains recognition, but speaking Chinese needs production
A typical Anki card shows you 地方 and asks if you know what it means. You think “place”, flip the card, and press Good.
That’s recognition: seeing something and knowing it. Speaking is the opposite direction. You start with a meaning and have to pull the Mandarin out of memory, fast, with the right sounds and in the right order. The two skills are related, but practicing one doesn’t automatically give you the other. That’s why a big deck can sit alongside a frozen mouth and lead to 哑巴中文 (you understand Mandarin but can’t speak it).
You can make reverse cards (English on the front, Mandarin on the back), and lots of people do, I did too. But then you hit problem 2.
In the Fluency Trainer, every card is production. You see an English prompt and say the Mandarin out loud. There’s no flip-and-think option. If you can’t produce it, you quickly find out.
2. Self-grading in Anki lets wrong tones and word order slip through
With a reverse card, you say the answer in your head (or mumble it), flip, and decide whether you got it right. That’s where things go wrong:
- Close enough counts. You thought 我想问一下 but would actually have said 我问想一下. In your head it felt right, so you press Good.
- Tones get waved through. You can’t easily hear your own tone mistakes, especially silently. Most self-graded cards quietly assume your tones were fine.
- Speed isn’t measured. If the answer took eight seconds to arrive, it still counts as correct. In conversation, eight seconds is a frozen silence.
None of this is laziness. Grading yourself fairly is just very hard to do as a learner, and the schedule is only as good as the grades you feed it.
In the Fluency Trainer, you speak and the app grades you. It checks which chunks you said and whether the order carries the right meaning. On top of that, every character gets a vowel/consonant score and a tone score, and where a tone slipped it tells you which tone you said and which one the character needed. You can replay that single character in your own voice next to a native recording.
And the grading is flexible. You’re marked on whether your sentence means the right thing, not on whether it matches one model answer word for word. Say 在哪儿 instead of 在哪里, or use a synonym or a different correct word order, and you won’t be marked down. Real speech has more than one right answer, and a grader that only accepts one teaches you to recite rather than speak.
This only works if the speech recognition can actually understand learners. Most speech recognition is trained on native speakers, so when a learner gets something wrong it tends to guess what you meant and mark you correct. Ours is trained on thousands of sentences from learner speech, so it hears the mistakes learners actually make.
3. Making Anki cards for Chinese takes longer than studying them
Every Anki user knows this one. You find a great sentence in a video or a class, and to turn it into a useful card you need the characters, the pinyin, a translation and ideally native audio. Add-ons help, but setting them up is its own hobby. Plenty of people end up with decks full of half-finished cards, or stop adding sentences altogether.
The other route is a shared deck, which is quick to start but full of sentences someone else wanted to say.
In the Fluency Trainer, there are two shortcuts:
- Add several. Paste in a batch of sentences from your class, your tutor or your notes, and generate the pinyin, English and audio for all of them in one click.
- YouTube import. Paste a transcript and the app recommends which sentences to learn, based on the vocabulary it already knows you have. The longer you’ve used it, the better those picks get.
And you don’t have to build a deck from scratch at all: there’s a full HSK 1–5 chunk curriculum, with placement so you skip what you already know.
4. Cramming in Anki throws off your spaced repetition schedule
Sometimes one review a week isn’t enough. There’s a chunk you keep getting wrong, or one you get right but too slowly. You want to hammer it ten times today.
In Anki, that means building a filtered deck and choosing a setting. Either your extra answers feed into the schedule, so a burst of cramming can push a card weeks or months into the future, or they don’t count at all. Neither is quite what you want.
In the Fluency Trainer, that’s what Packs are for. Go to My sentences, group your trickiest chunks and sentences into a Pack, and drill it as often as you like.
The rule that keeps it safe: however many times you drill something, it only moves your schedule by one step.
- Get it right → moved forward at most one step
- Get it wrong → moved back at most one step
So if a chunk is due in 1 day and you drill it 10 times, your next review is in 2 days, not 2 months. The extra practice counts, but it can’t trick the scheduler into thinking you’ve mastered something after one good afternoon.
A good place to start: a Pack of your 5 trickiest chunks.
5. Vocabulary flashcards don’t teach you to build Mandarin sentences
Most decks are built around individual words: 想, 问, 地方, 哪里. Even if you know them all perfectly, putting them together at speaking speed, with the grammar in the right place, is a separate skill. Whole-sentence cards help, but you end up memorising that exact sentence rather than something you can reuse.
Fluent speakers work in between those two extremes. They retrieve ready-made chunks, pieces of a sentence that already carry their own word order, and snap them together:
我想问一下 (I’d like to ask) + 这个地方 (this place) + 在哪里 (where is) → 我想问一下，这个地方在哪里？
In the Fluency Trainer, you learn chunks like these, then the Speak step gives you English prompts that need two or more of them combined into a sentence you’ve never practiced. You’re not memorising sentences. You’re practicing the act of building them, out loud, which is what conversation actually asks of you.
6. You learn to recognise the Anki card, not the Chinese
After a few dozen reviews, something sneaky happens. You see a card and know the answer before you’ve really read it. Maybe it’s the length of the prompt, the first word, or just the way it sits on the screen. You’re not recalling the Chinese any more. You’re recalling the card.
It feels like progress, because you press Good every time. Then you meet the same word in a different sentence and it’s gone, because you only ever learned it attached to one context.
In the Fluency Trainer, you can file several example sentences under a single word or chunk. When that item comes up for review, the app rotates between them, so you’re asked to produce it in a different sentence each time. You can’t lean on the shape of a familiar prompt. You have to actually retrieve the chunk and fit it into a new context, which is exactly what speaking demands.
The main curriculum works the same way. Each chunk comes with multiple example prompts that rotate across reviews, so 我想问一下 shows up asking about a place one day, a price the next, and a time after that. And because grading is flexible, you’re free to answer each one naturally rather than reciting a memorised line.
Anki vs the Fluency Trainer: where each one wins
To be fair to Anki: it’s free on most platforms, endlessly customisable, and works for anything, not just Mandarin. I have used Anki for years and years and still highly recommmend it. If you’re learning to read characters, memorising radicals or studying for an exam in another subject, it’s hard to beat.
The Fluency Trainer is narrower on purpose. It does one thing: get the Mandarin you know out of your mouth into real conversations, correctly and without freezing.
| Anki | Fluency Trainer | |
|---|---|---|
| How you answer | Think, flip, self-rate | Speak out loud |
| Who grades you | You | Speech recognition trained on learners |
| Tone feedback | None by default | Per character, with your audio vs native |
| Adding your own sentences | Manual, or via add-ons | Add several (one click), YouTube import |
| Extra drilling | Filtered decks | Packs (moves schedule one step max) |
| Built-in course | Shared decks | HSK 1–5 chunk curriculum with placement |
| Best for | Reading, characters, any subject | Speaking Mandarin fluently |
Anki for Chinese: frequently asked questions
Is Anki good for learning Chinese? Anki is excellent for recognising characters and vocabulary. It’s weaker for speaking, because most cards test recognition and you grade your own answers, so tone and word-order mistakes often go unnoticed.
Can Anki help me speak Mandarin? Reverse cards (English to Chinese) help as do cloze deletions, but you still judge yourself silently. To build speaking, you need to say the answer out loud and have it checked, which is what the Fluency Trainer does.
Do I have to say the exact sentence on the card? No. The Fluency Trainer grades flexibly, on meaning rather than an exact word-for-word match, so synonyms and other correct phrasings count as right.
What is the best Anki alternative for Mandarin speaking? Look for an app that keeps spaced repetition but makes you answer out loud, grades your tones, and lets you add your own sentences quickly. The Fluency Trainer does all four, with speech recognition trained on learner speech.
Can I use Anki and the Fluency Trainer together? Yes. Many learners use Anki for reading and characters, and the Fluency Trainer for speaking.
Isn’t an AI tutor enough for speaking practice? AI tutors are great for conversation, but they solve a different problem. See why an AI tutor won’t fix your speaking
Try speaking flashcards with your own Chinese sentences
If Anki for Chinese has made you great at recognising Mandarin but you still freeze when you speak, the fix isn’t more cards. It’s answering them differently.
Take the two-minute placement, then paste in a handful of sentences you’ve been meaning to learn with Add several. Answer them out loud and see how the difference. One of our students, Debbie, put it like this:
‘This program is by far the best I have found to help with me with my conversations. It actually is making it easier for me to recall the correct sentence structures. It’s hitting a different part of my brain and I am actually remembering.’
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