How to Print Vocabulary Worksheets from Integrated Chinese and Other Textbooks

If you are taking a Chinese course, the vocabulary you actually need to be able to write is the vocabulary in your textbook — not a generic frequency list. But a textbook gives you a word list to read, not a sheet to write on, and copying twenty words per lesson into a grid by hand is exactly the kind of busywork that stops people practising at all.

This guide covers how to turn any lesson's word list into a print-ready practice sheet in a few clicks, for the three textbook series whose vocabulary is built into this site.

Which textbooks are covered

The word lists come from the textbooks themselves, lesson by lesson, with the pinyin, part of speech and English meaning exactly as the book presents them.

Each series is browsable down to the individual lesson — Integrated Chinese is split into its four volumes with ten lessons each, New Practical Chinese Reader into five volumes, and YCT into its four levels. A lesson page lists every word it teaches, grouped the way the textbook groups them (Dialogue 1, Dialogue 2, Vocabulary), and each word links to its own page with stroke order and meaning.

Two ways to get a lesson onto paper

Both routes end in the same place: the worksheet generator, pre-loaded with every word from the lesson you picked.

Route 1 — start from the lesson page

• Open the textbook index and choose your series, then the volume, then the lesson.
• Check the list to confirm you are on the right lesson — the page shows every word with its pinyin, part of speech and English meaning.
• Press Generate this lesson's worksheet PDF. Every word from the lesson is loaded into the generator and a preview renders immediately, so you can see the sheet before you print it.

Route 2 — start from the generator

• Open the worksheet generator directly.
• In the left-hand column, find the section labelled Load from textbook and pick the series, then the volume, then the lesson. There is a filter box above the lesson list, which is worth using for New Practical Chinese Reader at sixty lessons.
• The lesson's words drop into the text box and the preview updates. From here you can edit the list — delete the words you already know, or add a few from the previous lesson for review.

Choosing the right output mode

The generator has three output modes and they produce genuinely different sheets. For textbook vocabulary the default is usually the right one, but it is worth knowing what the others do.

A combination that works well for a weekly lesson: print the lesson's words in Words mode as the main sheet, and switch to Characters mode for the two or three characters in the lesson that are completely new to you.

Settings worth changing

• Grid. Tianzige — a cross through each cell — is the default and matches what most textbooks use. Mige adds the diagonals, which help with slanted strokes. Square is a blank cell: switch to it once proportions come naturally, because it is the closest thing to a page of ordinary paper.
• Cell size. The slider runs from 11 mm to 19 mm and starts at 15 mm. Go large for a first pass at unfamiliar characters, and drop to 11–12 mm when you are polishing, since small cells expose balance problems that big ones forgive.
• Paper size. US Letter by default; switch to A4 if that is what your printer takes. The sheet is 100% vector, so it stays sharp at any size and prints cleanly at 300 DPI.
• Header. For teachers, the name-date-class header prints a line for the student's name, date and class on every page. There is also a custom header option if you want the lesson title or a due date instead.

Every lesson fits on one sheet

Words mode accepts up to 300 Chinese characters, which raises an obvious question for a lesson with a long list. We checked all 121 lessons across the three series: not one exceeds the limit. The longest is New Practical Chinese Reader Volume 5 Lesson 58 at 275 characters across 139 words, and the median lesson is around 75 characters. In practice you can load an entire lesson without touching the cap.

A routine that holds up

• Before class, print the coming lesson's word sheet. One sheet per lesson keeps the paper organised and makes progress visible at a glance.
• In class, write on paper rather than tapping. Handwriting is slower, and that is the point — the delay is where the character gets encoded.
• After class, load the same words into the online practice tool and check any character you were unsure about. It plays the standard stroke order and flags strokes drawn in the wrong sequence, which a printed sheet cannot do.
• Once a week, print the previous lesson's list again with no pinyin annotations visible and write it cold. Words you can produce from memory are the ones that will survive to exam day.

If a character will not stick

Recurring trouble with one character is usually a stroke-order problem rather than a memory problem: writing it in an order your hand does not expect makes it different every time, so nothing accumulates. The eight rules behind stroke order are set out in Chinese stroke order rules, and any character on this site — including every word in your lesson list — opens a step-by-step stroke breakdown.

Everything described here is free and needs no account: browse the textbook word lists, generate a sheet from the worksheet generator, and print as many copies as your class needs.