The Gospel of John in Chinese
A 187-page printable workbook. One chapter a day for twenty-one days.
Reading a whole book of the Bible in Chinese is a better way to learn characters than any word list, because the words come back. John is the usual place to start — short chapters, plain vocabulary, and a story you probably already know, which is exactly what lets you guess your way through a sentence you cannot yet parse.
From chinese-bible.com
The Gospel of John in Chinese — 21 Days
A printable workbook: one chapter a day, with pinyin, a vocabulary list keyed to HSK levels, and stroke-order diagrams with 田字格 practice grids for the characters that carry each chapter.
- 21 daily readings — the whole Gospel of John, one chapter per day
- Chinese, pinyin and English side by side, in a layout meant for paper
- A vocabulary table per day, marked with HSK level, built from the words actually used — each word taught once in the whole book
- Stroke-order diagrams for every practice character, so you learn to write them the right way round
- 187 printed pages, with a contents page that tells you where each day starts
PDF · A4 · 187 pages. Print it as many times as you like, for yourself and your household. Copies for a class, group or church need a separate licence. The worksheets on this site stay free.
How a day works
Read the chapter aloud from the pinyin, then again from the characters alone. Work through the day's words — twelve of them, the ones that first appear in that chapter and keep coming back, each marked with its HSK level. Then write: the page shows you the strokes of each character in order, one added at a time, and gives you grids to copy it into. About twenty minutes.
Why stroke order is in it
Chinese characters have a correct stroke order, and it is not decoration: it governs how a character looks when you write it at speed, and it is how dictionaries and handwriting input expect you to produce it. Learning it wrong is hard to undo later, so every practice character here carries its own diagram rather than assuming you will look it up.
What it is not
It is not a course and it will not teach you grammar. It is a reading and writing companion for someone with a little Chinese already — if you know a few hundred characters, the English line will carry you through the rest. If you are starting from nothing, begin with the free course instead and come back to this.
The words are taught once
187 pages hold 252 words and 168 practice characters, and none of them repeat: a word introduced on day 3 is not introduced again on day 11, so the vocabulary pages stay worth reading all the way to the end. The contents page tells you which chapter each day is, how many verses it runs to, and the page it starts on — the chapters are not the same length, and pretending otherwise would just make day 6 a nasty surprise.
Before you buy anything
The printable worksheets on this site are free and always will be, and so is the three-day sample. Print a day, do it, and see whether the format suits you before spending anything.