How to persist a List of Strings in Hibernate?

I seem to have problems with mapping a List in Hibernate. In our project there a class Card with contains a class Answer with Answer containing a List<String>.

Is a List<String> mappable by Hibernate using annotations? I mean, since it does not have the @Entity annotation?

Regards

Use @ElementCollection:

@ElementCollection
@CollectionTable(name="Nicknames", joinColumns=@JoinColumn(name="user_id"))
@Column(name="nickname")
public List<String> getNicknames() { ... } 

Source: 7.2.3. Collections of basic types and embeddable objects

try

  @org.hibernate.annotations.CollectionOfElements(
        targetElement = java.lang.String.class
    )
    @JoinTable(
        name = "foo",
        joinColumns = @JoinColumn(name = "foo_id")
    )
    @org.hibernate.annotations.IndexColumn(
        name = "POSITION", base = 1
    )
    @Column(name = "baz", nullable = false)
    private List<String> arguments = new ArrayList<String>();

or see this detail example

If you are happy to store them in the same column as JSON (MySQL, PostgreSQL that also support indexing and binary JSON), you could simply use com.vladmihalcea/hibernate-types-52 library.

@TypeDefs({
    @TypeDef(name = "json", typeClass = JsonType.class)
})
public class YourEntity {
   @Column(nullable = false)
   @Type(type = "json")
   private List<String> fieldName = List.of();
   ...
}

See full guide here