I have just finished my first semester of Chinese, and I could not have done it without the help of Anki, which is a flashcard software that helped me learn the Chinese characters. I finally have an effective Anki note template which incorporates stroke order animations and audio.

Template Structure

Hanzi Writer library

Using text-to-speech (TTS) is of course inferior to using audio files recorded by native speakers, but TTS adds zero storage requirements and is very easy to add in Anki.

Gotchas

The stroke order feature does not work offline since Anki needs to download the stroke order library from the internet.

Additionally, when creating new cards and copy-pasting characters, it’s important to not accidentally paste any formatting.

In the screenshots below, the characters at first appear unformatted. However, if you click on the <> button to toggle the HTML editor, you will see some extra text, which will prevent the stroke order animations from working.

One solution is to have the HTML editor open when creating new cards and paste characters there, which will automatically remove any formatting.

Get the Template

The easiest way is to import an Anki deck that I’ve made that just contains a single card. Importing the deck will add the custom note type called “Chinese - Basic (optional reversed card)” into your Anki, which you can start using in your own decks. The template deck can then be deleted. You can get the deck by downloading the file Chinese Template.apkg: https://github.com/tg2648/anki-chinese-template.

Alternatively, the link above also contains the HTML code for the template if you simply wants to see how its build.