) questions about the challenge, and making a tracking spreadsheet (see pic below). French
I started with an easy reader that I've read at the beginning of all of the Super Challenges, Rémi et le mystère de Saint-Péray. It's not too boring for an easy reader, and I decided that it's now a tradition. Later in the day I listened to the audio of the same book three times (but I'll count it twice). Yesterday on a walk I listened to about half of another easy reader audiobook, Enquête capitale, which is really my favourite easy reader I've read in any language. The story is simple enough, but very engaging. The audio is really slow for me now, which isn't too bad for listening to while in the countryside, but I certainly won't be listening while reading. I read the first chapter of Le petit Nicolas a des ennuis before bed, which will be my first full book for this SC. I started it last SC but only read about half of it, so I'm starting it again from the beginning. Finally, I watched 3 episodes of Les p'tits diables this morning, a French cartoon that I have on DVD. I used to watch it occasionally on TV5 Monde and bought the 1st series DVDs for a previous SC. Back then I probably caught 10-20% of the words, although I could tell what was going on. Now I feel like I'm catching at least 80% of the spoken words.
German
I've read 5 chapters of German Easy Reader, by Brian Smith, while listening to the audio. I've read and listened to this before, but what I'd like to do for the immediate future is to read+listen through his 3 easy readers, move on to his pre-intermediate reader, and then finally tackle his 3 intermediate readers if I'm still interested. I haven't done anything for the film half in German yet, but my plan is to review the audio for each book after reading it.
Hindi
I'm starting Hindi by reading a few children's books I dug out of old boxes and closets. Some of these came with CDs so I'll use that for the film challenge, as well as Bollywood films. So far I've just read one book, लेमड़ी और गिलहरी (Lomri aur Gilhari, Jackal and Squirrel), which I'm counting as 5 pages.
I'm quite happy with my spreadsheet now. I have six tracking pages, one for books for each language and one for films for each language. I made a data summary page which adds up how much I've done and calculates the % progress for each item. I made a sort of "thermometer" chart for each language which shows the % progress for books and films. That was simple.
The more difficult one was to make "speedometer charts" to show how I am doing today. As you can see, for my French Books, French Films and German Books the needle is all the way to the right, indicating I am at 2x or more where I should be today. Hindi Books is a bit below the middle, indicating that it is a bit behind where I should be today, and the other three charts the needle is at the bottom because I haven't logged any activity yet.
To make these charts I added columns calculating how much I should have completed by the present date and created a formula working out the percentage of that number completed to date. For example, if I should have read 50 pages by now, and have actually read 75 by now, this value would be 150%. The needle of my speedometer runs from 0-90, so I multiplied to-date completion % by 45 so that if I was 100% on the needle would point straight up. Any value over 200% was set to 90, so if I'm 2x or more of my to-date target the needle is all the way to the right.
I had never actually made a speedometer chart, found a few tutorials, finally settling on this one: https://excelchamps.com/blog/speedometer/, which I followed making a few modifications of my own. I had a lot of problems formatting the needle properly, and it turns out that for the pie chart the needle is made from, it is important to make the needle's outline and fill the colour you want, and for the other wedges to make the outline and fill clear. The website didn't mention the outlines, just the fill colours.
