Sites for learning Chinese

[missbusylizzie]

What are some of your favorite websites for learning Chinese? Mine are:

& Zhongwen.com, a good dictionary for a quick search on more common words and phrases.
& Pristine Lexicon, a nice resource for less common words. You can only search a certain number of times per day, though, it seems.
& MDBG Chinese-English dictionary, mostly helpful (for

Comments

[lissa_maylee]

YES! Simplified is much, much easier.

[gaojun]

This is a big can of worms, especially because it's a highly politicized issue, but I think people make simplified and traditional characters out to be a bigger deal than they really are. They're not THAT different, and they're about equally difficult to learn to read--but simplified characters are obviously easier and faster to write because there are less strokes.

On the other hand, when people from Taiwan write things by hand, they use shorthand characters anyway, so the difference is superficial. It's kind of like the PRC government just said "everyone is now required to write in shorthand, and must use this specific set of shorthand character forms." And now that people just type everything, the difference is even more superficial. As a foreign learner of Chinese, though, you should be able to write at least one of the two character sets and be able to read both.

[frances_bea]

Personally, what I find most difficult is needing to know both sets. But I can't blame anyone for this. As gaojun said, the PRC didn't invent the simplified characters, and even universal acceptance of them will not soon make the traditional characters unimportant.

I sometimes find the simplified characters easier to read when image quality is not good, as with fuzzy subtitles on the television or photocopies of really small writing.

Other times, the simplified characters don't seem any simpler than the traditional versions and I wonder why anyone bothered to change them.

[dynamint]

I like POPjisyo for browsing webpages. If you enter a url or block of text, then when you hover your mouse over the word it provides the meaning (in English) and reading. Works for both traditional and simplified (and Japanese and Korean). It won't recognize all words as words, but at least with the reading it's easier to find them in the dictionary.

[msittig]

I use Adsotrans.com for the same thing, but I like it better because it's open source. If there's a word it doesn't have (maybe a word that appears a lot on the page I'm reading) I can look it up on some other site (dict.cn or iciba.com) and contribute it. Then a reload later, and all the appearances of that word have the right translation and pinyin. Woo.

[missbusylizzie]

There's a Firefox extension for that--actually, quite a few: link

But that's cool that Adsotrans is open source.

[missbusylizzie]

Oh, cool. Actually, Firefox has an extension for that...oh, wow, after searching, there's actually quite a few: link

[missbusylizzie]

Thank you! =) I'm glad it was helpful.

[qaexl]

http://chineseetymology.org/ - very useful if you're reading the classics.

And of course

http://www.unicode.org/charts/unihansearch.html - Unicode database

-Q

[boonleong]

very useful if you're reading the classics

Why are you reading them in 篆書?

[qaexl]

To really understand any word in any language in depth, you have to look at its history.

There's also certain documents that remains written in seal script.

-Q

[missbusylizzie]

Wow, that first one is cool. ^_^

[chinkerfly]

Someone else already mentioned Chinesepod which is definitely a favorite of mine, and I don't pay, I just get the free podcasts (which now even have full chinese transcripts that show up on your ipod, also free!)

This may or may not count as a site, but I've found it indispensible: dimsum translator It even has this wonderful feature where you draw the character and it searches for likely matches.

[sanguinetalons]

Agreed on dimsum tools. I haven't seen the "draw a character" feature though, I'll have to figure that one out.

[missbusylizzie]

The dimsum translator looks like a useful tool. =) I have a Firefox extension which translates webpages for me, so it's sort of like the dimsum translator, only with fewer features.