Mandarin Flashcards

A flashcard app specifically designed for the complexities of Mandarin! Switch between Hanzi (characters), Pinyin (the sounds) and English meaning to learn all three aspects of Mandarin. Enhanced difficulty algorithms can be adjusted based on your appetite for challenge and personal progression. My goal in creating this app was to make flashcards fun, and make it more difficult to just "guess" the word like so many other apps allow.

Four directions, tracked separately. See a character and pick the sound, see the sound and pick the character, or start from the English and go either way. Each direction keeps its own score and its own difficulty, so a word you can read isn't assumed to be a word you can say.

Wrong answers are picked to be genuinely hard. Distractors are scored on the initial and final pairs learners actually confuse (zh/z, ang/an) and on characters that share a radical, a component or a shape, including 740 hand-checked lookalike pairs. Four difficulty levels decide how many of the close ones you face. Cards start at two choices and climb one at a time to fourteen as you get them right; miss one and it steps back down and comes round again sooner.

Start with the words that matter most. The Frequency deck orders the language by how common each word is: 250 units of 20 words, with unit 1 the 20 most frequent words in Mandarin. Practice the vocabulary that carries the most conversations first, and work your way down to the rarer stuff. Prefer a syllabus? The full HSK 3.0 word lists (levels 1 to 9) are built in as decks too, and you can import your own units.

New: practice whole phrases. 2,430 conversational phrases across 18 topics, from ordering food to asking for help. One word is blanked and you fill the gap, in either direction. Once a phrase is familiar it comes back as shuffled tiles for you to put back in order.

Watch the characters get written. Every Hanzi prompt is painted stroke by stroke, in proper stroke order, so the shape sinks in while you answer. Pick your brush speed, or switch the animation off.

Tones are colored as you practice. Pinyin is tinted syllable by syllable, and every character takes the color of its own tone, so you start recognizing tones by sight instead of hunting for the little mark. There is a legend in Settings and a separate switch for each. On Hanzi and Pinyin rounds the tint fades once you have leveled a card past ten choices, so the colors can never hand you the answer.

Hunt bounty cards for gold. Decks mark one card in every 25 as a bounty. Level it up to 14 choices and it deals a special 15 choice gold round, and getting that one right turns the card gold. All four practice directions are hunted separately, so every card has four golds to win, each with its own trophy ladder in the Trophy Room.

Short term or long term, your choice. Short term keeps your active deck moving so nothing waits much more than two weeks. Long term follows a real forgetting curve across your whole card pool: every correct answer multiplies a card's rest by 2.5, out to a year. Both are tracked at the same time, so you can switch whenever you like without losing anything. Add a daily goal and a day streak, and separate profiles that keep separate progress.

Everything runs offline. All 14,443 cards are built into the app, so there is nothing to download and no account to create. If you create custom cards with new characters, the strokes data will be auto downloaded, which does require a connection.

This app pairs perfectly with whatever Mandarin course or app you're learning with. Reinforce what you're learning with flashcards in parallel!

Terms of Use (EULA): https://www.apple.com/legal/internet-services/itunes/dev/stdeula/