The Best! Albeit with slight flaws

Let me begin this review by saying, THANK YOU for including traditional characters. THANK YOU THANK YOU. For those of us out there who prefer to teach, use, read and learn traditional characters, the dearth of Mandarin educational products available in the Western market can be depressing. Moving on, yes, this is probably the best flashcard app or study tool ANYWHERE if youre aiming to prepare for HSK/TOCFL or just want to memorize vocabulary.

#PROS
- Easy to use. Its true what someone said, the app gets out of the way and just lets you study. No frills, no complications.
- Ready to Use Vocab Lists. You do not need to enter in characters, make your own cards (you can if you want) or make your own lists and the price includes thousands of cards. There are 16 preloaded options on Chinese and Taiwanese government official vocab and hanzi lists available to study.
- Traditional Option Across All Cards. Did I mention how amazing this is? Now I can study HSK.
- Color Coded. The flip/list option is nice for a quick visual.
- Study Schedule. The calendar function is actually very handy. I can plot out cards and plan daily targets.

%CONS
- Mistakes. There are content mistakes in the app. The cards themselves arent usually wrong, theyre just in the wrong list or not organized properly. For example, 吃 chi1 is listed in the TOCFL Basic list as "to suffer" instead of "to eat". While thats correct, 吃 can be used "to suffer", "to eat" is the most basic and most frequently utilized definition of this hanzi. To make it worse, sentences on the 吃 card are for the eating definition, not for the suffering definition. Ive encountered this type of problem a lot and my students get confused when theyre using the app. Youd need existing Mandarin knowledge to figure out the mistakes.
- Sentences. Theyre not useful at the beginning level, when you need them most. Most of the sentences are written on an intermediate difficulty level, and they use vocab not included in the previous lists or the current list youre studying.
- Audio Quality. Its awesome they have audio clips for the vocab but the quality is staticky and volume inconsistent. Also the audio sometimes doesnt match the tone listed on the card .
- Fewer Functions. Compared to its competitors, this app has nothing else but flashcards. Itd be amazing to have stroke order animation and allow the user to practice writing hanzi using touchscreen.

To reiterate, this app really is the best easy to use FLASHCARD option out there, anywhere. However youd probably need to supplement with other Mandarin apps. Ive used the Kanji Japanese version of Stickystudy and I feel its more refined, probably because it seems the developer is stronger in Japanese and could catch a lot of subtle content errors during production. If the same attention to detail can be addressed here and if the errors and sentence discrepancy were corrected, this app would be perfect. Presently, its just near perfect.

katatatkat about StickyStudy Chinese