Chinese Learning Resources
Skritter is great for learning characters and words, but it can't teach you Chinese by itself. You'll need speaking and listening practice, too. Ideally, your life is full of Chinese-speaking people with whom you can practice. Or perhaps you are taking a Chinese class from a good teacher. If not, or if you want more practice, here are some resources that we think are useful.
ChinesePod is the best online service we've found for learning spoken Chinese, which is why we're partnered with them. The core of ChinesePod is its large lesson archive. These are dialogues with explanations of words, grammar, and culture by Shanghai-based radio hosts. ChinesePod is great for getting additional context for the language at all skill levels, and the lessons have great audio quality.
ChinesePod also offers a host of other study methods; we recommend checking them out for yourself. Some of them are quite effective, and most are reasonably priced. And with our recent partnership, you can now use Skritter's Scratchpad on ChinesePod to fill in the writing void while listening to great audio.
The MDBG Chinese-English dictionary is the best dictionary we've found. It's got handwriting lookup, sentence lookup, translation, quick searching without having to specify whether you're putting in English, pinyin, or simplified or traditional Chinese. It's based on the free, open-source CC-CEDICT dictionary, which we love and use in Skritter.
nciku is a large, free site for gathering dictionary definitions and example sentences, managing vocabulary, and testing yourself on words and characters. They have some good word-based pronunciations, which is quite useful. Like MDBG, it has handwriting lookup. With its example sentences, it makes a great reference tool.
ChineseTeachers.com is one of the best solutions we've found for getting one-on-one Chinese lessons. They hook up independent teachers with independent students via a web-based audio platform, with an emphasis on flexibility that we think is very cool: you get to pick your teachers at any time and are only billed for the time you actually use. It's a great way to support independent teachers, and one-on-one lessons can't be beat for efficiency or motivation.
We met the founders of AhaChinese at a big language learning conference in November 2009. We were very impressed by their drive, their warmth, and of course what they are making. If you want to teach your younglings Chinese, we highly recommend their materials.
All Japanese All The Time (AJATT) is a powerful site run by Khatzumoto, who taught himself to seriously rock Japanese and is also learning Mandarin and Cantonese. They All Laughed When He Learned 4280 Characters Before Any Words, But When He Started To Speak! The site is like a pool of motivation in which you should jump, regardless of which language you're learning.
Popup Chinese is another source of audio Chinese lessons, with a couple neat tools like Adsotrans and a Firefox dictionary plugin. Good at disambiguating words in sentences when doing translations.
Wenlin, is a powerful dictionary based on John DeFrancis' ABC dictionary. It's incredibly thorough and especially good for sussing out which definition is accurate. We use it here at Skritter to double check definitions. The interface looks like it was designed in 1995, its flashcards aren't great, and it's not web accessible, but it does what it's was intended to do: rock Chinese lookup hard.
Dict.cn has example sentences in Chinese and English for words that you look up, which is useful.
HSK Flashcards, run by Jake Marble, provides several good downloadable/printable word lists, as well as an online flashcard tool. Jake provided some of our word lists; thanks Jake!
What if English was written like Chinese? An essay explaining some characteristics of Chinese based on their structure, via analogy with English. Whether you know Chinese or not, this is a fascinating read.
PlaySay is a cool site to help all of you mobile addicts. Offers Chinese, Japanese, and Spanish vocabulary flashcard modes and has lots of premade lists to make it easy to get started.
Pīnyīn.info has a lot of information about how to use pīnyīn, some of the rules for which can actually be pretty complex.
Lingualism is a collection of a useful non-spammy links to other cool Chinese learning resources. Arguably one of the best resource collections we've seen, the size of the site may be a little daunting, but it's worth having a look around.
Mandarin Tools has a well-done Chinese to English dictionary based on CEDICT and a plethora of tools for learners.
Omniglot has a truly great collection of pages you should read through if you are new the language and want to understand the basics. The explanations are comprehensive, the writing is accessible, and there are lots of good examples.
Chinese-forums is the place we go when we want to talk about learning Chinese, what tools other people use, and how to overcome learning barriers. It's a very well run and overall motivating forum with lots of energy!