Panki Chinese – Manual

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How to study with “Panki Chinese”?

“Panki” stands for “patched Anki“. Anki is a flash card review/study software. It is important to familiarize yourself with it, independent of “Panki Chinese”. For that, install Anki (see installation). Panki requires Anki as base anyway. Read Anki’s documentation and use it a little, otherwise Panki might seem complicated.

Once you know Anki, get and install Panki. Usage is similar.

General rules

1 from deck version 5 on, sentences with sentence percentage of at least 80% will be ordered with Reading first (R-L-S-W) to strengthen reading abilities. – I noticed the effect of “singing” the sentence from memory instead of reading otherwise.

Figure 1: Listening card of a sentence. The sentence percentage in the upper left area is 37%. Here the core answer in maroon is the English meaning and the pinyin. Additional information is in gray. The typed-in answer is corrected: green is okay, red has mistakes.

Study hints

Figure 2: Hanzi writing card. The icons in the upper left relect level and type: compound card of “step 1”. Don’t use pinyin input methods to write hanzi (see text).

Self-evaluation hints

Figure 3: Sentence Reading card. Pinyin can be written with numbers (3rd party plugin bundled with Panki). Traditional Chinese is shown for information only (gray) and highlighted where it really differs (weak orange).

Other features

Sentence cards have a “sentence percentage” in the upper left corner (below the type/level icons). That is a static number, it does not adapt on later reviews. A percentage of 100% means all individual characters got introduced with the tones used. 99% or lower reflect the amount of characters you have been exposed before via character/compound cards (possibly different tones or pinyin). Use this for:

With the “Allow numbers to match pinyin tone marks” plugin (included in Panki Chinese) you can write “wo3” to get “wǒ”.

Pictures and some pinyin disapear on later reviews. This measurement is to avoid remembering by image or other hints. Once the question is answered, they reapear again.

These type/level icons change while you advance: I hope it gives you additional motivation to advance to new icons...