This is a rather tricky question. Ideally, I would put contextualised vocabulary on the front, but this is tricky to do as a student unless you’re willing to spend way more time than it’s worth creating flashcards. I don’t think the number of homophones is that large? I mean yes, there are a bunch, but for multi-syllable words with tones included, it should be a small minority of cases. Either don’t worry about getting them wrong (i.e. thinking it’s 意义 when it’s actually 异议) or try to leave some hint on the front somehow. For example, you could have an extra field on the front that you only use for homophones where you can add a clue of some kind. This is not ideal, berceuse the fact that there is a clue is itself a clue, so to speak. You could possible solve this by making it hard to see or don’t look at the screen when you review, unless you think it is a homophone and then you check the clue. A third option is to add a collocation or short phrase instead of thee word itself. Anyway, I wouldn’t be too concerned about this!

This is a complex discussion, so bear with me if I don’t give you a straight answer. Here’s what I would do:

1. Consider what you want to learn about vocabulary (pronunciation, definition, Pinyin, usage, etc.)
2. Consider how you will learn each of those things (flashcards, reading books, listening to podcasts)
3. Consider how to set up flashcards to deal with things you will use flashcards for

This is important, because if you’ve been learning for three years, I think your listening and reading ability should be good enough to simply read and listen your way to a broader vocabulary. This has so many other benefits that it’s simply a better way than flashcards most of the time. That doesn’t mean that flashcards can’t be helpful (I do still use flashcards in Skritter, after all). If your goal is to boost your reading and listening ability, I think passive cards you can review quickly are worth considering (which I think is what we’re talking about here).

In that case, it’s also important to think about what you put on the front of the card. If you put more than one thing there, you don’t know what you’re actually testing. If you put Pinyin and pronunciation, you don’t need to listen to get it right, you can just read the Pinyin. Is that what you want? Maybe, maybe not. If you put definition and character on the front, which of these are you actually testing? I would be very careful with this, because it’s possible to “cheat” quite a lot. I notice this in Skritter when I have both pronunciation and definition, because I can often guess the handwriting simply by knowing the pronunciation, but that won’t work in real life if I’m not 100% sure of the pronunciation.

Long comment, but to build passive knowledge quickly, having a pure reading and a pure listening card would work, I think (i.e. having only character on one card and only audio on another). You can then put all sorts of information on the back to review more carefully (maybe example sentences for usage, explanations, etymology or whatever you want). Hope this helps!

“definition to character” was a mistake. I meant “definition+character to pronunciation”. I originally thought it would help me remember the pronunciation of the character, but it seems unnecessary.

The question would then be whether to simply delete or replace this second card by a sound file on the front to try and practice listening.

Hi! Thank you for your comment. I can try to help, but I think I’m a bit confused by your references here. Can you spell out what exactly your two card types look like and what the question is? If I understand you correctly, you’re asking about your second (passive) deck, where you have characters on the front and other stuff on the back, which doesn’t seem particularly useful to you (and I would concur). Is that right? Because you then write “definition to character” further down, and this is surely the hardest type of card and not what you described earlier. Did you in fact mean “character to definition”?

At the beginning, I only had one deck for HSK characters:
-Each note stands for a character or word from the HSK word list (I did not separate into individual characters):
–> Front side is the pinyin (+colour for tone), sound file and translation; back side is the chinese character. I have 2 cards for each note so that I either write the character, or try to recall the definition / pronunciation and tone.

A few months later I created a new deck for passive vocabulary after reading some more articles here.
I have almost the same type as the one you describe above for basic words:
–> Front side is the character and sound file, back is the pinyin with colour for tones, definition and sentence examples.
I again have a one note two cards system, but sentence examples are not shown when I need to find the character. Also, I do not write characters by hand when reviewing this deck, it has to be fast passive vocabulary.

3 years of Anki later, 2 conclusions, 1 question:
First, I have resisted merging my two decks. I prefer doing my HSK characters handwriting separately and in one specific ‘timebox’ when I won’t be bothered. The second passive vocabulary deck doesn’t require time quality of that ilk and can be spaced out.
Second, I have realised that my second card type (definition to character) is almost useless for both my decks now (as you say in the article, it seems one can do without at a certain stage). Indeed, most of those cards have never had a negative review.

The question is about your reference to pronunciation in the info provided in the cards. Do you mean by that a sound file, an IPA field or colour-coding the pinyin for tone purposes?
The reason I’m asking is that you wrote in another article about SRS that in hindsight, you would have included a sound to character/word card for review practice if I’m not mistaken.
Thus I’m wondering. If my second type of card does not really make sense anymore, should I just delete it or perhaps reformat it to work on sound recognition? Note that in my case, up to now I have mostly added words.
I’d be grateful for any opinion and or advice.

It depends on how patient you are, I guess. If very patient, then just add recall, trust that you will read/listen enough to learn how it’s used, then start using it weeks or months from now when you feel comfortable with it. If you’re in a hurry, add a very short phrase, either with a cloze test or translation from Chinese (or a picture or whatever you prefer).

I currently am fed up with my current method. I use ANKI for recall: I add an example sentence using the word in which I put the English on the front and the Chinese on the back. I use skritter for character recognition (and practice writing only the top 1000 characters). However, I feel that I should not be using skritter for recognition. Any tips?

Hmm… I never thought about the cloze cards until I read your article. That might be a good idea for a later stage I think.

I tend to use only one deck per subject (Mandarin, IPA, French, etc.), there is no reason (I think) to split Mandarin into several decks. I think you can tag as much as you like, the more the better, although it obviously stops being meaningful at some point. I usually tag at least for the source (textbooks when I used them), but nowadays I don’t care that much and seldom tag at all. Since I create different types of cards (cloze, recognition and so on), that works as an additional filter. This is enough for me, at least.