Who runs this site?
My name is: Kendra（凯娜) (My personal site)
Time in China: Lived in Beijing from 2002-2022
Now live in: USA
Age: 42
My day job: Tech policy research
Email me: nihao@chinesereadingpractice.com
The Backstory
I’m a life-long learner of Mandarin Chinese. I lived in Beijing for 20 years as an American expat, from 2002-2022, and received my BA in Mandarin Chinese from one of China’s top language universities. Although I moved back to the US after the COVID pandemic, my day job still requires me to read dozens of Chinese documents a week. In my spare time, I most enjoy reading Chinese sci-fi novels, ghost stories, and modern fiction.
I started CRP in 2011 as a side-project, in part to hold myself accountable for studying Chinese on a regular basis, in part to pay it forward and help other students improve their skills. At the time, I found it very difficult to find materials at my reading level. I didn’t know where on the Chinese internet to look for something to read. When I did find something, it was either too long, too short, too easy, or too hard, and I ended up spending more time looking for something that was suitable than actually doing any reading. Even worse, every time I found something new to read, I never knew if I would be able to finish it. I’d often get through a few paragraphs only to hit a phrase I couldn’t decipher and, with no one to ask, would have to put the reading aside. So, I started this site, and every time I found something worth translating, I’d post it here to share with others.
Why CRP is free
Although CRP has been online for 15 years, and serves tens of thousands of learners per month, I’ve never turned it into a subscription site. There are a few reasons I never monetized it. One of those reasons is that I have a day job, and it takes 10-15 hours to produce just one translation (or at least, before AI, it used to). That meant I couldn’t always commit to posting regularly, so I didn’t want to charge people for a service that I couldn’t deliver on a reliable basis.
But there’s an even more important reason I never charged money for CRP: subscription-based services create barriers to access for students, particularly in less developed countries. Over the last 15 years, I’ve heard from hundreds of Chinese learners in places like Cambodia, Indonesia, Hungary, Belarus, and Nigeria, where unfavorable currency exchange rates and low local wages make paying even small app fees impossible. Many of these students mention this type of hardship in the site comments. And it’s not just learners in third world countries that can’t afford even cheap signups – underpaid teachers in underfunded schools (including in the US) often have to pay for learning materials out of their own pockets, and they already barely get paid. That’s why hundreds of teachers all over the world use CRP in their classrooms. Every time I thought about paywalling the content, I felt a twinge of guilt thinking about all of the people who would no longer be able to use it.
Instead, I count on volunteer donations to cover site costs. If you can afford to help CRP remain free, please consider supporting us with a donation.
AI and CRP 2.0
When I first started CRP, I was pleased with myself if I could manage to put up just one translation a week – but that didn’t always happen. In fact, finding new items and making new posts was so time-consuming that sometimes, I didn’t manage to post for an entire year.
But AI has changed the game. After the emergence of ChatGPT, I realized I could use the tool to automate a lot of the time-consuming parts of making new translations – even enabling me to put up a new post each day, something that would have been impossible before.
Don’t worry – I’m not intending to use AI to generate a bunch of Chinese language slop. At some point, I’ll put up a post explaining in more detail how I’m using AI, but for now, suffice to say that each translation I post is still very hands-on. That said, AI has helped me solve almost every one of the problems that was making it difficult for me to create translations on a daily basis in the past. Now, I’m using AI to:
- Do the first pass at translation (although I often end up editing these)
- Automate the code formatting on new posts
- Re-write advanced Chinese texts using simpler vocab appropriate for beginner learners
That last point is the most exciting use of AI. The majority of learners that use CRP are beginners who just started taking Chinese lessons. It’s easy to find advanced reading material. But the overwhelming majority of Chinese texts online are not suitable for beginner readers. It used to take me up to 20 hours to find one beginner text. But with generative AI, I can take an advanced text, and ask AI to simplify it. That means I can churn out beginner-appropriate texts in minutes. Pretty cool, huh?
How did you do those pop-up Chinese hover effects?
Thanks to Alex, the coder behind Mandarinspot.com, Chinese Reading Practice now has pop-up translation on Chinese texts – hover over any mandarin word in the reading text to see the definition. If you’d like to implement something similar on your own blog, you can head over there and grab his Javascript file / annotations API.
Unfortunately, the pinyin and definitions generated by the script is not always right. It can’t be – it’s trying its best, but it can’t understand the context of the sentence, so sometimes when a character has more than one pronunciation, it’ll choose the wrong one. Sorry!
Commenting rules
I try to maintain a pleasant learning environment, so obscene or abusive (you idiot!), pointless (I am Groot.), or unhelpful (Hi.) comments will be deleted. I will also delete links from your comments unless those links are very relevant to the post. For example, it’s fine to link to a Wikipedia page that’s relevant to Chinese or to the content of the translation, but if you link to your own site, I sadly don’t have time to verify if it’s a phishing link or malware or inappropriate content so I’m just gonna take it out. I don’t always manage to catch all the spam that slips through, though, so apologies if there’s some clutter.
Enjoy, and good luck with your studies.