6 Free HSK Vocabulary Tools With Pinyin, Audio & Export

If you’re looking for the best free HSK vocabulary tool with audio in 2026, my honest recommendation depends on what you’re starting from. If you already have an HSK-level reading passage — a sample sentence from an old exam, a graded reader paragraph, a textbook excerpt — and you want pinyin, audio, and an exportable deck out of it fast, that’s exactly what I built Flashcard for: paste the text in, the AI extracts the vocabulary worth learning, and you get a reviewable deck with text-to-speech pronunciation that exports to CSV, URL, or clipboard. It isn’t a pre-built HSK 1-6 wordlist app — it works from whatever text you give it, HSK material included — and for official structured wordlists, Anki’s community HSK decks or Pleco’s HSK add-ons are worth having alongside it.

Here’s how six free options compare before we get into the details.

Tool	Best for	Audio?	Export format	Price
Flashcard	Extracting vocab from HSK-level passages you paste in	Yes (TTS)	URL, CSV, clipboard	Free
Anki + HSK shared decks	Structured HSK 1-6 wordlists with SRS	Varies by deck (many include audio)	Native Anki format (.apkg), CSV import/export	Free
Pleco	Dictionary lookup, stroke order, handwriting	Yes (add-on/varies)	Limited; mostly in-app flashcards	Free (paid add-ons)
HelloChinese	Guided HSK-aligned lessons for beginners	Yes	None (in-app only)	Free (freemium)
Du Chinese	Graded HSK-level reading practice	Yes	None (in-app only)	Free tier (freemium)
Browser dictionary extensions	Quick one-off lookups while reading	No	None	Free

Free HSK tools with audio?

Audio matters more for HSK prep than most people initially treat it as, because HSK listening sections punish learners who’ve only ever seen characters on a page and never actually heard the tones spoken at natural speed. Of the tools above, four give you audio in some form, and they’re not interchangeable.

Flashcard builds text-to-speech directly into the review flow. Every card you generate from a pasted passage comes with an audio button, so as soon as a word is extracted you can hear it, not just read the pinyin. That’s the point of pairing extraction with audio in the same step — you don’t have to separately go looking up pronunciation once the word is on a card.

Anki doesn’t generate audio itself, but the HSK-specific shared decks community members have built and published over the years frequently bundle recorded audio per card. The catch is that audio quality and coverage varies deck to deck, and you’re dependent on whoever built the deck having included it.

Pleco has audio through its add-ons, and it’s a solid dictionary-first option if you want to hear a word the moment you look it up.

HelloChinese and Du Chinese both include audio as part of their guided lesson and graded-reading experiences respectively, which makes sense given they’re built around structured courses rather than raw lookup or extraction.

Browser dictionary extensions are the one category here that’s typically audio-free or audio-limited — they’re built for speed of lookup, not for building a reviewable, listenable deck.

Which let you export to CSV or Anki?

This is where the field narrows quickly, because most HSK apps are built as closed ecosystems — you study inside them, and the vocabulary mostly stays there.

Flashcard exports every deck you build as a shareable URL, a CSV file, or straight to your clipboard. The CSV path is the one that matters if your goal is to get vocabulary into Anki, a spreadsheet, or any other tool — CSV is close to a universal format, and Anki in particular accepts CSV import directly through its built-in importer.

Anki, on the native side, is obviously the export/import champion by design — that’s the whole point of the platform. HSK shared decks import in one step through AnkiWeb, and once inside Anki you can re-export as CSV or share decks with others.

Pleco, HelloChinese, and Du Chinese are largely closed loops for vocabulary export. Pleco has some flashcard functionality internally, but none of the three is built around getting a word list out into a CSV or another SRS tool — they’re designed to keep you inside their own review or lesson system.

If you’re someone who reads a lot of native or HSK-adjacent material and wants a portable vocabulary record you can move between tools — say, extracting from Flashcard and then consolidating everything into a single long-term Anki collection — the CSV export step is what makes that workflow possible instead of locking your words into one app forever. I wrote more about that extraction-to-deck pipeline in my piece on turning any Chinese article into flashcards with AI, which covers the same export options in more depth.

A walkthrough: from an HSK passage to an exported CSV

Rather than just describe this, here’s an actual pass through it. Say you’re studying for HSK 4 and you’ve got a short reading-comprehension-style passage in front of you — the kind of sentence you’d see in a past exam or a graded reader:

随着城市交通越来越拥挤，越来越多的人选择骑自行车上下班，这样既环保又能锻炼身体。

(“As city traffic gets more and more crowded, more and more people are choosing to bike to and from work, which is both environmentally friendly and good exercise.”)

1. Paste it into Flashcard. Open flashcard.fulinlabs.com and drop the passage straight in — no formatting or cleanup needed.
2. Let the extraction run. The AI identifies the 2-3 character words worth studying out of that sentence — 交通 (jiāotōng, “traffic”), 拥挤 (yōngjǐ, “crowded”), 自行车 (zìxíngchē, “bicycle”), 环保 (huánbǎo, “environmentally friendly”), and 锻炼 (duànliàn, “to exercise”) — each with pinyin, a definition, and an example sentence.
3. Listen to each card. Tap the audio button on a word like 拥挤 and you hear it spoken aloud, which is the piece a plain wordlist or a static PDF never gives you.
4. Review with Reveal, Pass, Again. Study the deck using Flashcard’s spaced-repetition loop — I go through exactly how that scheduling works in my breakdown of the SRS method behind Flashcard, but the short version is that words you mark Again come back sooner, and words you Pass drift further out, so review time concentrates on what you’re actually struggling with.
5. Export as CSV. Once the deck exists, export it as a CSV file. From there you can drop it straight into Anki through its CSV importer, open it in Google Sheets to review offline, or just keep the file as a running record of every passage you’ve extracted vocabulary from.

The passage above happens to be HSK 4-ish in difficulty, but nothing about the workflow is HSK-specific — the same five steps work on a news article, a chat message, or a paragraph from a novel. That’s the tradeoff worth being upfront about: Flashcard doesn’t hand you an official HSK 1-6 curriculum out of the box. What it does is turn whatever HSK-level material you’re already reading into a deck, fast, with audio and a real export path — which is a different (and for a lot of learners, more useful) starting point than downloading a static wordlist you didn’t choose.

Where each free tool actually fits

None of these six tools are strictly better than the others across the board — they solve different pieces of HSK prep:

• Flashcard — best when you already have HSK-level text (a passage, an exam excerpt, an article) and want a fast, audio-equipped, exportable deck out of it. Free, browser-based, no install.
• Anki + HSK shared decks — best if you want a structured, level-by-level HSK 1-6 wordlist with proven spaced-repetition scheduling and the deepest customization of any tool here.
• Pleco — best as your dictionary and lookup layer, especially if stroke order or handwriting recognition matters to you.
• HelloChinese — best for beginners who want guided, HSK-aligned lessons rather than a standalone vocabulary tool.
• Du Chinese — best for graded reading practice at an HSK-adjacent difficulty level, with audio built in.
• Browser dictionary extensions — best for a quick one-off lookup mid-read, not for building a reviewable deck.

In practice, a lot of learners end up combining two or three of these rather than picking one: Anki or Pleco for the structured foundation, and something like Flashcard for turning the actual reading you’re doing right now — HSK passages included — into vocabulary you’ll actually retain, instead of letting it pass by as a one-time lookup.

If you want to try the extraction-and-export workflow yourself, head to flashcard.fulinlabs.com and paste in any HSK-level text you’re currently working through, or read more about the project on its hub page.