Yeah I've got the iPhone version of the Anki app. There's a good Mandarin deck called Spoonfed that gives you sentences instead of just words. Much better. But, by far the most effective way to learn the language is to practice with natives. Which I have been doing for a few weeks and the results are amazing.
I've been learning Mandarin for about 3 years now. In April 2017 I released my own program to add spaces between words: https://pingtype.github.io
The best spaced repetition method for me is listening to music. If I watch a film 5x or see a flashcard 5x or read a comic 5x, I'm bored. But I can listen to the same song 20x and still like it.
