Description

Testimonials

I like this deck a lot and fully expect to use it for years to come. Made by someone who seems to know a thing or two about Chinese and learning with flashcards. Recommended. (source)

I wasn’t disappointed when I downloaded this one. It has really nice card styling and good audio and definitions. The definitions include various meanings and the variant pronunciations thereof. Of course, with Anki everything is customizable to suit you but the hard work has been done already with this deck. (source)

great and well worth the money (source)

worth every penny (source)

an invaluable resource for reinforcing vocabulary and grammar (source)

Flashcard Structure

This deck has been designed to aid your ability to understand Chinese on the HSK and in daily life. To achieve that goal the flashcards utilize a passive-recognition structure. That is, you are presented with the characters of a Chinese word and must answer with the reading(s) and meaning(s) of that word. For example, here is the flashcard for “词汇”.

Just like English, many words have more than one common meaning. Many Chinese words are also homographs: words with multiple pronunciations and meanings. These flashcards will teach you all the common readings and meanings of each word. Here is the flashcard for “拽”.

A minority of words in the deck (2.5%) have too many readings and/or meanings to test effectively on one flashcard. I have used Anki’s cloze deletion function to split the information for these words into multiple flashcards. Here is the second flashcard for “澄清”.

Other Features

No DRM or Subscription Fees

After buying this deck you are free to use it however you like for as long as you please. (I only ask that you don’t share these flashcards or any non-open-source component of this deck with others because that directly reduces the amount of money this project is able to donate to UNICEF.) Other platforms may offer digital flashcards for studying Mandarin Chinese that aren’t garbage, but they charge a monthly $15 to $30 subscription fee for continued access. Learning Chinese is a lifetime endeavor; paying a monthly subscription fee just doesn’t make sense!

Interference Warnings

Many Chinese words look awfully similar when viewed in isolation. Perhaps you won’t get 节日 and 节目 confused, but you might be thrown for a loop by 董事 and 懂事 or 邮箱 and 油箱. Other words don’t look similar, but the individual meanings of their characters may cause confusion. For example, you may see 温室 (“warm” and “room”) and think “sauna”, but the actual meaning is “greenhouse” (sauna is “桑拿”). When you’re reading Chinese the context usually makes it abundantly clear whether the author is talking about 加速器 (accelerators) or 推进器 (propellers), but such words will cause you no end of headaches when you’re trying to build your vocabulary with passive-recognition flashcards.

To keep you from pulling out all your hair, these flashcards will warn you when you’re studying a word that can be confused for others. For example, here is the card for 节日.

Is this cheating? I don’t think so. Our objective in studying these flashcards should be to improve our reading ability, not get good at answering flashcards. In any case you can always remove these warnings by navigating to the card template editor (Tools>Manage Note Types>Mega Mandarin>Cards…) and then deleting the line “<div class=interferences_style>{{interferences}}</div>” from the front and back card templates.

Word Frequency

The answer side of every card has the HSK ranking of that word: HSK2.0一级 through HSK2.0六级 if the word is on the current HSK vocabulary list and/or HSK3.0一级 through HSK3.0七至九级 if the word is on the finalized HSK 3.0 vocabulary list. All flashcards have tags with this ranking information so you can prioritize the vocabulary you want to learn.

Every flashcard also has information about how common that word is, measured in frequency per million words (FPMW). This word frequency metric is largely based on the gigantic 15-billion-character BLCU corpus, along with some supplementation from the Lancaster Corpus of Modern Chinese and the SUBTLEX-CH word frequency listings. A sliver of flashcards in this deck (0.7%) didn’t appear on any of these word frequency listings (probably due to word segmentation issues when the listings were generated), so they have a FPMW of “0.00”.