A year ago I made a new year’s goal to read the first Harry Potter book in Chinese. A scary huge goal, especially given my limited Chinese skills. Why not choose an easier book? Because the easy books are mind-numbingly boring, and Harry Potter is just too good not to read.

So, I found a friend to read with and built a spreadsheet to help us.

The Spreadsheet

The core of the spreadsheet is pronunciation practice. Each chapter is added to the sheet with one word per row. After typing a guess in pinyin, the sheet marks it green (correct), yellow (almost there), or red (way off). It’s addictive enough that we always try and guess again when we get a yellow.

There’s also a reveal pronunciation feature if we really don’t know the pronunciation. Similarly, there’s a reveal definition feature if we don’t know the translation. Better yet, this shows all of the translations rather than just one, so that it’s possible to see other uses of the word.

Every week, my friend and I set a goal, often just a page or two, and we each use the spreadsheet separately to learn the words we need to know to read that section. Then we get together and read and translate sentence by sentence out loud to each other. The spreadsheet is a great reference because it has all of the pronunciations and translations that we need.

Which words are most useful?

Reading is only the start. The other hard part is knowing which of the new words really matter, a.k.a. which we should study for the long term. For that, part two of the spreadsheet shows which words we both had to reveal. From there, we can see how frequent each word is as well as each of the individual characters. We choose to study the words that contain frequent characters, even if the words themselves aren’t that frequent.

Sometimes a big goal is helpful to strive for, but it’s hard to keep slogging along without seeing progress. This spreadsheet helps us tackle the book and feel good about every word along the way.

If you want to learn more, leave a comment. Thanks!