2025 Goal—Tracking my Chinese learning progress
- Jane Zhang
- 5 min read
The new year rings in new resolutions. This year, I’m determined to take my Chinese learning to the next level by tracking my Chinese learning progress.
As a Chinese heritage language learner, my primary goal is to connect with my heritage. To be frank, this is a weak motivator. Why? Because it’s not measurable nor is it specific. This situation creates a problem. Since I have been learning so casually, I don’t have a system or structure I’m following. Unlike the typical Chinese learner, I’m not going through a workbook or studying for a test. As a result, there are many instances when I lose motivation and cease learning, especially when I don’t feel progress.
As this Redditor puts it:
‘…I feel beat down, unmotivated and like i’m wasting my time and money. Studying mandarin is my way to connect to my background (I’m British born Chinese) but I feel more disconnected than ever”. It’s demotivating to say the least when you aren’t sure if the time and effort spent is worthwhile.
But I don’t want to give up.
Over the holidays, I thought about how much ground I’ve already covered studying Chinese. The amount of progress I’ve made is incredible, yet it’s not visible. So, I’m going to make them visible this year.
You can’t improve what you don’t measure
How do you know if you’ve improved your language skills? This is a very difficult task to quantify. Results motivate. If prove that I can run 20 kilometres when I could only run 10 a few months ago, this progression will motivate me to continue running.
Moon, a blogger who shares her Chinese learning journey tracked her progress by the number of cards she had in her flashcard deck. In her post reflecting how she went from reading Chinese intermediate to native web novels, she “had reached around 9,000 words in [her] deck and had read roughly 4 million characters worth of Chinese content” after 18 months. That’s an insane stat to claim. Honestly, I’m jealous. I can’t claim how many cards I have in my flashcard deck because I’ve been so inconsistent updating it.
To take matters into my own hands, I sat down last month to benchmark exactly where my Chinese proficiency was. Working with a tutor is an excellent way to estimate your skill level, but it isn’t exact enough to be useful. I already know that I’m roughly at HSK 5, which is at an intermediate level. But how do I measure progress?
Measure vocabulary count
Your vocabulary repertoire is a useful indicator of your proficiency level. The more words you know, the stronger command you have of a language. In Chinese, it’s not useful to measure characters recognized. Just because you recognize 打(hit/strike/knock) and 折 (discount/rebate), doesn’t mean you know 打折 (sell at a discount). However, this forum discussion makes a good point that tracking characters is helpful for beginners, while tracking words is useful for intermediate learners.
I’ve lost count the number of times I replayed the Instagram video above. It’s hilariously relatable and captures the unique challenges of learning to read Chinese. Video source: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DBJb7eGARDq/
I created a spreadsheet and copied and pasted the vocabulary lists on this page from HSK 1 – 5 (I only went up to 5 because that’s where I’m at, you should only go up to your current level). Then I went through each word and marked if I knew it or not. After a few hours, I can now confidently say I know 1,666 words! This is awesome because I can concretely measure my progress in another 3 months to see if this number went up.
To help me study, I filtered the characters I did not recognize from HSK 1-4 and included the full vocabulary set from HSK 5. Then I imported this list into Pleco to study as flashcards.
Measure study periods
Anyone that knows me knows that I’m the Notion Queen. My life runs on it. Notion is a cloud-based productivity tool.
To reward myself for when I study Chinese, I’ve started a Notion calendar and mark how much time I spent studying. In addition, I mark which category I tackled during my studies.
My 2025 Goals
This year, I plan to study at least three times a week. If I can keep this schedule up, I can increase the length of each study session once it becomes a habit.
Each study session starts with a vocabulary test with my Pleco flashcards for 10 minutes, followed by the monthly Hacking Chinese Challenge. In January, the theme is writing. I’ll be looking up Chinese stories and practice writing them by hand to familiarize myself with the sentence structure.
At the end of each quarter, I’ll assess my vocabulary again to see how many more words I’ve learned.
I’ve got a good feeling about 2025 and cannot wait to share my progress a few months later.
Are you learning Chinese this year? Let me know in the comments what your learning goals are and how you plan to achieve them.