Cpod's little brothers!

http://realimaginary.com/HanziBar/ http://www.chinese-tools.com/

I used OpenVanilla for a while, but each character selection required way too many finger actions for my liking. Maybe I was missing something. After inputting on Mac for months, I discovered that the built in Hanin input method is really good. You have to get deep into its configuration dialog box and tweak it to do normal pinyin input, then you'll never want to use the other alternatives. In Preferences, under the Modes tab, there's one puzzling thing. There is a label "ZhuYin" and beside that a selection box, and that's where you select pinyin. Strange, huh? To use it you just type something like ni3hao3,qing3wen4,ce4suo3zai4na3li3? and while you're typing you see the characters appear. Many characters are wrong, and as you keep typing the sentence they change to other characters, taking in the context, until the completed sentence has them all correct. Of course you can interrupt it and manually select a character at any point. It's easy, low stress input. I like the way that it forces me to enter the tones, reinforcing that information. In contrast to this, I hate having to select a first tone character by hitting 4 for the 4th character in the list, like many input methods require. Mac user? Set up Hanin and give it a good try before you go looking for alternative input methods.

Oh, I forgot! 56.com for Chinese TV , music, and movies.

Open Vanilla for input on a Mac. Ditto on Chinesepera-kun. I don't know how I survived without it. One caveat: You'll be tempted to use this *all the time*, but I suggest going over a page once or twice, and then turning off pera-kun to see if you can remember any of it.

Apparently I screwed something up on the Chinesepera-kun link. Here's the URL: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3349

Favourite Character Entry procedure: 谷歌拼音(google pinyin) Anything else you can think of: "中国造"搜索引擎,www.baidu.com那样的

@sparechange, what is Open Vanilla? What does it do? I have an iMac G5.

wow, what a great amount of knowledge about the super useful tools there are out there. These are like supplements to the main diet of Cpod! Thanks for sharing with us who are the foot of this big hill (mountain?) but eager to climb. Got any more?

Doc: OpenVanilla is an "input method" that lets you type in pinyin (among other things), and it will spit out 汉字. Like wei1xiao4 said earlier, you type in pinyin, and select the character from a list that comes up. OpenVanilla has a lot more features (most of which I don't use very often) than the stock methods that comes with OS X. Probably the biggest thing that will spoil you, is that it recognizes common character combos (such as 汉字), so you don't have to hunt for each character individually. In other words, you just type in "hanzi" all at once instead of "han" (look for character) and then "zi" (look for character). Clear as mud? Feel free to ask more if I didn't explain very well.

Here are a couple tools from previous threads... If you have a Palm OS PDA, this is a great program for learning how to write characters: Dragon Character Training A good flashcard program is the ZDT program at: Zhongwen Development Tool

http://www.mdbg.net/chindict/chindict.php?page=worddictbasic (also has pronunciations and Hanzi animation options) ChinesePera-kun For roll-over translation I forget what I use for writing. You type the pinyin and then you choose the correct hanzi character.

This for pinyin input: http://www.chinese-forums.com/pinyinput-install.zip

I still use http://zhongwen.com/ for the dictionary even though its main focus is traditional characters. They way it breaks characters into radicals that are clickable is really helpful - often I recognize a radical in an unknown character and can think of another character with the same radical.

Thanks C-pod Vets...i will be checking out all these cool links.

For inputting the odd pinyin word with tonemarks into an online text field I use the ABCTajpu Firefox addon: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/459 Not immediately obvious but you can set Chinese pinyin in options which reduces the otherwise cumbersome menu navigation

If no-one else will let me plug Adso: www.adsotrans.com. Use it for text annotation or hanzi-to-pinyin conversion, or simplified-traditional conversion, etc. Or download it and run your own machine translation engine. We're the dictionary behind Chinese Perakun (edits to the ChinesePod dictionary are going to the project as well, by the way). The software focuses on contextual and grammatical analysis of Chinese text, as oppose to simple database lookups. 慢慢来 as they say.

Sparechange: standard MacOS pinyin input method does exactly the same. OpenVanilla is a good source for more 'exotic input methods' but these tend to be of limited use to students.

This is a good dictionary site: http://www.zdic.net But not really suitable for newbies.

Sparechange: I couldn't work out how Open Vanilla was any different from the normal pinyin input method aside from being slower. Am I missing something?

My favourite input method is 紫光华宇拼音输入法: http://www.unispim.com/