Flashcards: Anki vs Pleco vs Skritter
After spending six months with each of these, this is where I see their strengths and weaknesses.
Chinese Specific Features
Dictionary
Clear winner: Pleco. With multiple high quality dictionaries available (plus easy import of user dictionaries), Pleco is the clear winner. Not surprising since this is its primary function.
Skritter is a distant second, but it does not show parts of speech, has at most one usage example (which is often poor), and mashes all meanings of a character into one definition (e.g. 行, 得).
Anki's lack of a built-in dictionary makes adding new flashcards much more labor intensive. Even plugins (which don't work across all platforms) don't get anywhere near the convenience of Skritter or Pleco for adding lots of Chinese words to a flashcard deck.
Handwriting Input
Clear winner: Skritter. This is by far the strongest reason to use Skritter. I would recommend anyone wanting to learn to write Chinese characters start with Skritter (even if only for a few months) to really learn the basics of character formation.
Pleco's handwriting input is good enough to see if you remember how to write a character, but it is nowhere near Skritter for learning how to write in general. Even paper and pencil is probably better if you are a complete beginner and don't want to pay for Skritter.
Anki has nothing specific to offer (other than an Android plugin which I have not tried). You might be able to use your system's handwriting recognition to get similar results to Pleco.
Tone Drills
Both Pleco and Skritter have specific support for reviewing tones. They are about equal.
You could use the vast flexibility of Anki to construct tone cards, but I think this would be a lot of work compared to Pleco and Skritter.
Multiple Choice
Pleco can automatically construct multiple choice quizzes where all the answers meet basic obvious requirements (right number of characters, e.g.).
Audio
Both Pleco and Skritter have native speakers speaking full words (not just pieced-together syllables). Pleco even has the option to download both male and female versions of each. Pleco also gives you better control over which audio plays when there are multiple variants. Skritter selects randomly somehow (having mushed all the meanings together under one character).
The popular Anki plugin to help build Chinese flashcards can fetch TTS audio and add it to your deck. The quality is lower.
Reviewing Flashcards
Scoring
Both Anki and Pleco expose dozens of knobs for tweaking scoring. They are also more transparent about how scoring works. When reviewing cards they will show you exactly when a card will be reviewed again which makes it easier to choose and gives you more control. If you really want to, you can manually edit scores, batch reschedule, etc.
Skritter has very limited control and does not make it clear what the effect of saying something was "easy" vs saying it was "good".
Statistics
Anki has the best combination of detailed statistics and attractive display.
Pleco has good statistics but the presentation is pretty ugly.
Skritter knows the statistics and has pretty graphs, but those graphs are often buggy. It is hard (and slow) to try to control the time ranges for those graphs. The meaning of many of the numbers is not clear.
Filtering
Pleco wins here because the filtering is powerful, easy to use, and has Chinese specific features. Pleco also makes it easier than Anki to have cards belong to multiple categories and to study multiple categories at once.
Anki also has a huge amount of filtering power, but it's not as easy to use (with filtered decks etc).
Skritter is very weak in this area. You can permanently filter certain reviews (by banning them) and you can limit study to words contained in a single list.
Hinting
Skritter has the best system here, with the ability to hint strokes for writing practice, and the ability to use and share mnemonics. The biggest weakness of the shared mnemonics is that you will get a random "style" of mnemonic (different native language, mnemonics related to breaking down the character, based on rhyming with English words, based on "it looks like a boat", etc) by default on every word.
Anki can show your custom hints, or gradually expose other information from a card.
Pleco can gradually expose other information from a card.
Different Review Types
Pleco has the fastest and easiest setup of different quiz types (choosing what is shown and what you must do to answer).
Anki is the most flexible (and can include things like images), but if your goal is studying Chinese words then I think it is still second to Pleco. Pleco's idea of one database of flashcards which you review with different filters, presentation, and score files is much more convenient for studying word lists.
Skritter has 4 fixed review types. For example, Skritter will not quiz you on pinyin->definition. You can try (by reviewing pinyin->writing with definition initially hidden), but the scoring and repetition of that will go with the writing quiz.
Mixing Different Review types in One Session
Skritter and Anki can both show a mix of different review types (e.g. reading vs definition).
Pleco can only do one type of review at a time, as far as I can tell.
Speed
Both Anki and Pleco are local and suffer no real lag.
Skritter has to load information from the cloud after every (small) group of cards, and that can be a big proportion of the time for fast review types.
Managing Flashcards
Adding words Individually
Pleco really gets this right. You can OCR characters, draw them with your fingers, click them from the built-in reader, or just hit the + button on basically any screen anywhere in Pleco to add words.
Skritter forces you to add words to a list and then study that list, but other than jumping through hoops, you still only need to know the word and it will handle the rest.
Anki is much more manual, although there is a plugin that makes it easier.
Import
Pleco is the easiest. Just point it at a list of words and it will make flashcards (the advantage of all of the Chinese-specific features). You can pre-categorize them by adding lines to the import file.
Skritter can also take word lists, but you have to use a slow-ish web interface and paste them in in blocks of 200 at a time. If Skritter already has your list (e.g. a textbook or a reader), then of course you don't have to import at all!
Anki import is easy, but your input needs to be much richer than just a list of words. You'll want pinyin, definition, and probably audio.
Editing
Both Anki and Pleco have card browsers that can be used to edit or batch update cards.
Skritter makes this much more tedious. It will let you edit a lot of things (like custom definitions), but most of them have to be accessed from within a review of that card. The only real batch operation it has is "unban".
"Cloud" Access
Anki syncs your database online and it works across multiple devices.
Skritter is in the cloud and you can only access it with Internet.
Pleco can export/import the database (so it wouldn't be hard to move to another device for a vacation, for example), but it doesn't have automatic cross device sync.
API/Programmatic Access
Skritter has an API and fairly good documentation for it.
Both Anki and Pleco use SQLite internally. You can basically do anything to flashcards, scores, etc with external scripts, but documentation is sparse.
Anki has a plugin capability, but those plugins are not portable to the mobile clients. That can be enough if you do all of your card authoring on PC.
Summary
Anki and Pleco offer similar power and flexibility. Pleco has a lot of advantages if you are specifically using flashcards to study Chinese words. If you want a single tool to study all kinds of flashcards, Anki is the better choice, but the overhead of building "notes" about Chinese words is much higher compared to Pleco. One option to consider is using Pleco to build your flashcard deck, and using its XML export (which includes definitions, both simplified and traditional characters, pinyin, etc) as a basis for constructing Anki notes.
Skritter should be your choice if you are focused on handwriting. After using it for over 100 hours and learning over 1000 characters, my recommendation would be to stick to studying individual characters on Skritter (not words). Disable the other review types in Skritter. Use one of the other two tools for vocabulary building. Skritter is just too weak on meaning (lacking even parts of speech) and reviewing words with its SRS algorithm will force you to practice a lot of characters you already know (for example, my statistics show I've reviewed 然 126 times).
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