One of my personal goals has always been to be able to read Chinese fluently. I have been trying to do this from time to time, but except for a few graded readers and some really simple texts I foud out that most material was just too difficult for me. With only 2.500 characters under my belt this is more or less to be expected I think. So that is why I want to approach this in a more systematic way.

There are many online novels to be found on the internet. I found one that I would like to read on this website : http://www.sbkk8.cn/ . My plan is to make a "user made list" with a section for each chapter and then study this section just before I start reading the chapter. I never really used my own lists in Skritter, I just used the chinesepod lists and the HSK lists up till now. I just want to share with you how I go about creating a custom list for this book. If there are better ways to do this, please comment.

First problem is getting hold of a Chinese novel. The problem is that many download sites want you to download an exe file that manages the download. Most of these files are infected in some way, so, don't run these. Other websites, like the one above will let you read online but will not allow you to copy paste the text. Fortunately it is very easy to get hold of the text: just view the source code of the webpage (look for this feature in the menu of your browser) and then you can easily copy paste the text.

Next I needed a good parser for the text. I found that free program "Chinese Word Extractor" from Chad Redman does exactly what I was looking for. (Thank you Chad!). I pasted in one chapter at a time, then I hit File|Analyze and the result was presented in a nice way that you can be pasted into an excel sheet (Ctrl+A >> Ctrl+c in the result window, then Ctrl+v in the Excel sheet). Now I just copied and pasted the column with either simplified (or traditional) characters in a different worksheet and I had all the unique words of this chapter in one column, rteady to be uploaded to my skritter custom list

There are two kinds of "user made lists: small or big (with many sections); however there is always a limit of 200 words that you can import. If you exceed the 200 limit a new list or a new section will be created automatically by skritter. However, for me this was not the biggest problem. Far more annoying was that when you create a list, all words will be added, also the simple ones and I wanted to avoid this. I tried a few things and in the end I came up with the following method:

1. Create a new big list for the novel and create a first section labeled: Chapter 1

2. Add 1 word to this section.

3. Quick add a batch of 200 words to the same section. After adding these some kind of filter kicks in that will analyze the words you try to add and filter out those that are already marked as learned. You have the choice to include all words after the filter has run.

4. Repeat step 3 until all unique words in the chapter have been added. Using this method I reduced a chapter with 550 unique words down to 97 words that were not marked as 'learned' yet.

5. Continue to 'Quick add' words from the next chapters. The filter will still kick in and when the 200 limit is reached a new section will be created. Then you can edit the title of the section, so that you know what vocab is in the section (what chapters are included).

Marc

I can't open the website you provided. :S

The home page of that website seems to be unavailable right now, but strangely enough all the other pages seem to be accessible. Try this: http://www.sbkk8.cn/wangluo/