GraphChinese vs Anki for learning Chinese
Pick GraphChinese if you want the curriculum decided for you and then proven. Anki is the best scheduler that exists and has no opinion about what you should learn next. Forming that opinion correctly is the hard part of learning Chinese, and it is the part a course is.
Already have decks? Bring them. GraphChinese imports Anki .apkg files with their audio and images and schedules them with FSRS alongside its own 38 built-in decks.
Anki is free, endlessly flexible, and the best pure spaced-repetition engine there is. I used it myself for years. This comparison is honest about that, and honest about the one thing Anki does not do: it will not tell you what to learn or in what order. You are the curriculum designer. GraphChinese is the course Anki assumes you already have.
What Anki does well
- It is free and open source, runs on every platform, and syncs across all of them.
- Its spaced repetition scheduling is genuinely excellent and endlessly tunable if you know what you are doing.
- A huge library of shared decks means popular material, including HSK vocabulary lists, is one download away.
- Total flexibility: any card format, any media, any add-on. If you can imagine the flashcard, Anki can hold it.
Where it runs out: no curriculum
- You are the curriculum designer. Anki reviews whatever deck you give it. It has no opinion about what a beginner should learn before an intermediate learner, because it is a review engine, not a course.
- Deck quality varies wildly. Shared decks range from carefully built to riddled with wrong pinyin or stale definitions, and nothing in Anki checks the content for you.
- Nothing sequences by dependency. A card can sit in your queue testing a word that leans on grammar you have not met yet, and Anki has no way to notice or fix that.
- Most learners quietly abandon a 10,000-card deck. A giant unstructured deck with no sense of progress or mastery is the single most common way people give up on Anki for Chinese.
- It reviews vocabulary. It does not teach character writing in stroke order or train you to speak. Those are separate problems Anki was never built to solve.
The core difference: engine versus course
Anki is the engine; GraphChinese is the whole car. All 829 topics, from the four tones and the first stroke of 你 through HSK 6 grammar, live in one dependency graph, and a topic stays locked until every prerequisite is proven mastered, so you are never reviewing a card that assumes something you have not learned yet. Character writing is drilled in stroke order, speaking is trained from lesson one with a memorized comment and question kit you use on real people, and reviews are scheduled by FSRS just before you would forget. It is Math Academy's mastery learning, engineered for all of Mandarin, with the sequencing decision made for you.
And you do not have to give up a deck you already built. GraphChinese imports a .apkg exported from Anki straight into your account, audio and images included, and schedules it going forward with the same FSRS scheduler used everywhere else on the platform.
| Anki | GraphChinese | |
|---|---|---|
| Curriculum | None, you supply the deck and the order | Dependency graph of 829 topics, HSK 0 through HSK 6 |
| Sequencing | Whatever order you set | Mastery-gated: a topic unlocks only once prerequisites are proven |
| Deck quality | Varies, community-made | Built and checked in house |
| Scheduler | Excellent, self-tuned | FSRS, tuned to you |
| Character writing | Not built in | Active stroke-order writing, every character |
| Speaking | Not built in | Comment and question method from lesson one |
| Import your Anki deck | — | Yes, .apkg import with audio and images |
| Price | Free. The iOS app is $24.99 | $49 once, yours for life |
Prices and features checked August 2026. They move; if you spot something stale, tell us and it gets fixed.
Which one should you use
Use GraphChinese if you want the curriculum decision made correctly for you: what to learn next, proven by mastery rather than guessed at by a shared deck. Bring your existing Anki deck with you. It imports straight in and gets scheduled by the same FSRS engine, so nothing you already built is wasted.
Use Anki, on its own, if you already know exactly what you want to learn and in what order, and you are willing to build or vet the deck yourself. For a self-directed reviewer who enjoys curating their own material, nothing beats it for the price of free.
See the whole path instead of reading about it. Your first lesson, the four tones and tracing 你 and 好 in correct stroke order, is free on the landing page, no signup. The whole course, HSK 0 through HSK 6, is $49 once for lifetime access.
Start the free first lessonIs Anki good for learning Chinese?
Yes, Anki is one of the best tools for reviewing Chinese vocabulary once you already have a deck worth reviewing. It is free, open, and its spaced repetition scheduling is genuinely excellent. What it does not give you is a curriculum: Anki is a review engine, not a course, so you still have to find or build a deck, decide what order to learn things in, and notice on your own when a deck is teaching characters or grammar you are not ready for.
What is the difference between Anki and GraphChinese?
Anki is a general-purpose spaced repetition engine: you supply the deck and the order. GraphChinese is a full Mandarin course built on a mastery-gated dependency graph of 829 topics from HSK 0 through HSK 6, so every word and grammar point arrives only after its prerequisites are proven, and it also teaches character writing in stroke order and trains speaking from the first lesson, none of which Anki does on its own. Anki is free software you configure yourself; GraphChinese is a designed course for $49 once for lifetime access.
Can I import my Anki deck into GraphChinese?
Yes. GraphChinese imports a .apkg file exported from Anki directly into your account, including audio and images, and schedules it going forward with the same FSRS scheduler used for the rest of your decks. You do not lose a deck you already built by moving over.
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