How I use macros and Excel to learn Chinese characters
I use several Microsoft Excel macros together with a program called E-stroke 2.0 to learn Chinese characters:
1. When I open my learn 汉字 spreadsheet, macros run in the background, waiting for me to click on certain cells.
2. Once I click on cell address, Excel VBA automatically pronounces the Chinese character in a native speaker’s voice
3. Finally, Excel copies the character onto the clipboard so that I can paste the character into a program called E-stroke 2.0. I use this program to show me Chinese stroke order and learn which other characters matched the character I had clicked to form new words.
How do I get this to work?
1. I downloaded a list of the most frequently used Chinese characters here:
http://www.learnchineseez.com/read-write/traditional/index.php?page=5 and pasted them into Excel.
2. I downloaded a Chinese Dictionary here:
http://www.mdbg.net/chindict/chindict.php?page=cedict so that I use Vlookup formula to find the Pinyin of the characters. But the Pinyin is hidden for me in order to test myself to see if I had remembered the character.
3. Audio files of Native Speaker pronouncing each Chinese character can be found here:
http://www.quickmandarin.com/chinesepinyintable/: (Note: Even though there are more than 11,000 Chinese characters, there are less than 1700 pronunciations, so the same audio file can be used for all characters pronounced shi4.)
The cool thing about this macro that I wrote is I can test my ability to hear and disguised the sound in Chinese because let’s face it, a lot of times, we can’t even guess what characters Chinese people are speaking and we also get confused by similar sounding words. I believe this program will help me with that.