About Learn Mandarin

Updated August 28, 2026

Why 3,000 words

The deck is the HSK 3.0 vocabulary for bands 1 through 4, in the order the standard teaches them. That is a deliberate ceiling rather than a stopping point we have not passed yet. Three thousand words is roughly the span between recognising nothing and reading a menu, a sign, a message from a friend — and it is small enough that finishing it is a real prospect. A deck of thirty thousand words is a reference work. This is meant to be completed.

Within a band, new words do not arrive in dictionary order. They arrive in order of how often they turn up in the deck's own example sentences, so the words holding the sentences together reach you early. Ordered alphabetically, the app opened with 爱, 爱好, 八, 爸爸 — and made you wait until word 377 for 我.

How the scheduling works

Reviews are scheduled by FSRS, a modern spaced-repetition algorithm: each time you grade a card, it re-estimates how long until you would forget it and books the next review just before that. Cards you find easy drift weeks apart. Cards you keep losing come back tomorrow.

A card being learned asks you a question before it shows you the answer — what it means, which word went past in the sentence you just heard, which tones it carries, which word fills the gap. Once a card's interval passes three weeks the questions turn around and ask you to produce the word rather than recognise it: write the character and have the strokes graded, type the pinyin, or put the word back into one of its own sentences. Recognising 走 among four options is not the same skill as writing it on a form.

What is on a card

Every one of the 3,000 words carries the simplified characters, pinyin with a colour per tone, stroke-order animation you can also trace yourself, at least one example sentence with a translation, and spoken audio for both the word and its sentence — 6,000 clips, at full speed and at 0.7× beside it. The words are also grouped into 21 topic packs, so you can study food or travel or family rather than working down a list.

Where the material comes from

Almost none of the language data is ours, and that is the point: definitions come from CC-CEDICT, example sentences from Tatoeba's contributors, stroke data from Make Me a Hanzi, and the audio is Google Cloud speech synthesis rather than a recording of a person. Every source, every licence and every modification we make is named on the credits page, because those licences require it and because the people who built those corpora deserve the credit.

Community-maintained data contains mistakes, and this deck has inherited some. Every card has a Report an error button behind the reveal — a short list of what can be wrong, no free text — and those reports reach us. It is the most useful thing you can send.

Your progress stays on your device

Everything you do is stored in your own browser, not on a server. You do not need an account, and nothing asks you for one. If you want the same progress on a phone and a laptop you can make an account and it will sync between them, but the device stays the source of truth — signing out does not take your cards away, and deleting the account does not either. What we hold is explained in full in the privacy policy.

How it is paid for

Adverts, on the word pages of this site. There are none inside a study session — that is a deliberate limit rather than a current state of affairs, because a session is meant to be finishable and an advert in the middle of one is a second thing to finish. You will be asked before any advertising cookie is set, and declining gets you an untargeted advert rather than a broken app. In time there will be a way to pay to remove them, and it will remove adverts and nothing else: no word, no feature and no card type will ever move behind a purchase.

Who makes it

Learn Mandarin is operated by SproutVest, LLC, a Washington limited liability company, doing business as Learn Mandarin. The app is open source under the AGPL-3.0, so anyone can read exactly what it does — including everything the privacy policy claims about what it does not do. Parts of it were written with the help of an AI assistant, which is set out on the AI disclosure page.

Getting in touch

Corrections to the deck, questions, licensing, or anything else: [email protected]. A real person reads it.