Online study resources

mandarinboy

August 24, 2008, 07:19 PM posted in General Discussion

In my own studying i use a variaty of tools to help me be more effective. I will list some of them here if anyone else like to use them.

http://www.mandarintools.com/ Most of you probably know this site. If not, you realy must go there! There are both online and dowloadable stuff. E.g flashcards,text annotator,dictionary,encoding converter and much,much more. The developer is both a very skilled programmer and good at Chinese.

http://www.yellowbridge.com/chinese/chinese-dictionary.php This is a dictonary that have one extra feature and that is that it can break down each character in to pieces and explain the origin of them. Very useful when it comes to understand the meaning of an character. By understanding the origin it is easier to remember them.

http://www.chinese-forums.com/ Probabaly Internets most active forum for people studying Chinese or just interested in Chinese and or China. Here you find answers to most of your questions.

http://list.mp3.baidu.com/topso/mp3topsong.html#top2 Baidu is a site with tons of Chinese music to listen to or to dowload(usualy MP3). Here you find both Chinese pop from the charts as well as club music etc. Listen to Chinese music is a very good way to get used to Chinese and understand the pronunciation. I especially recomend Wang Fei, she is one of the main reasons i started to study Chinese;-)

http://www.zhongwen.com/ The original dictionary. Here you can search for words/characters and get the composition of the character with links to words using that character etc.

http://lost-theory.org/ocrat/chargif/ Ocrat who had those animations have by some reason closed their site but this site still hosts them. Here you can search for chinese characters and get an animation showing how to write them. There are also stroke order animations in many other dictionaries and software. Actualy, the code for that comes from one of my own early projects. I did manage to create java animations for around 1500 characters. ZDA, mandarintools, yellowbridge etc are all using my old code.

http://zdt.sourceforge.net/ an open source software to practice Chinese. Makes it possible to create your own study lists and practice. With many nice features.

http://www.euroasiasoftware.com/ht/index.html My own software for studying Chinese. Free software but seldom updated anymore due to lack of time. I am currently working on some updates though since i have taken up my Chinese again. Has many features not included in any other software. Many test features, print feeature for flash cards, annotation etc. Comes with many pre loaded study lists.

http://www.mdbg.net/chindict/chindict.php Very nice online chinese dictionary. On of the most used ones.

http://www.chinese-tools.com/chinese/examples A dictionary with example sentences for words. Also with many other tools on the site.

http://www.adsotrans.com/newsinchinese/ Read annotated Chinese news. Very nice feature. You get the news in Chinese. If there is any word you do not know you only have to hover the mouse over it to get the pinyin and translation. Adsotrans also have this feature as an download for firefox and lots of other tools.

Ok, that was all for now. Please add your own resources. There are so many on the net and i have probably missed several of them. I have only mentioned the one that i use my self most often. Naturaly i have not mentioned Chinesepod but that is the place where i hang most of my time:-)

shiqiangdan

August 24, 2008, 08:40 PM

Awesome list! These are all really useful learning resources. I suggest you all look through them and see which ones you like best. Thanks for posting!

Jordan

mandarinboy

August 27, 2008, 09:19 AM

Here are some more with focus on grammar:

http://www.ctcfl.ox.ac.uk/Chinese/grammarlist.htm

A list with the most important Chinese grammar. A very nice list with the most common structures and how to use many of them. Suitable for both newbie and elementary.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_measure_word

Wiki has a very nice article with most of the measure words and grouped in to categories.

http://www.languagerealm.com/chinese/measure_words_ch.php

A shorter lists with only the most common measure words.

light487

September 22, 2008, 03:30 AM

http://www.zhongwen.com/ The original dictionary. Here you can search for words/characters and get the composition of the character with links to words using that character etc.

Just wanted to highlight this one as I have been searching for a site that shows the characters with PICTURES rather than relying on the font installed on a computer. At work, our computers do not have the Asian Language Character support so up till now, I have been unable to look up characters while I was at work.

I decided to have a look at this site this morning and was very excited to see the Hanzi on the page. Each character is clickable and it seems to be laid out really well, with proper descriptions for the meaning also the reasoning behind the characters as well.

I am having trouble understanding what the third column of the page is attempting to represent but I think it just chowing a hierarchical view of the character and chunks that use the character.

This is a truly remarkle site worth visiting at least once.

mandarinboy

September 22, 2008, 07:30 AM

You are right, the third column do show sharacters where the character/radical/phonem is part of the character. This is one of the best parts. Unfortunately they have not updated all the external links to other sources. before you could search on examples of the word in mandarintools.com etc. Many of those links are now broken. One link is however updated and that is to stroke order animations. It now points to lost therory that have taken up the site from Ocrat. I often use zhongwen to find words and then use NCIKU to get examples of the usage of the character. This gives a lot of good information for me. You can do some of the break down of charactter on nciku as well but not as good as on zhongwen and not with pictures.