Learning Chinese - Review of some websites

[HedgePig]

Long post warning!

There is a lot of material for learning Chinese on the internet which is aimed at the beginner or elementary level. Advanced learners can use native material. However there is not much aimed at those in between. I've looked for useful sites and thought I'd review some in case this helps others. Before I get started:

1. I've looked at these sites very much from the perspective of how useful they are to me and not from the view of an absolute beginner or someone more advanced. My Chinese is probably at the "approaching intermediate" level. I know a little more than a thousand 1000 characters (to read) and have a vocabulary of around 2000 words - not of all them at ready recall! However, I have included sites which are beginner level if I found them useful (I still find pick up new vocabulary from beginner materials)

2. In terms of what I look for in a site, the following are important:

- material is free.

- I want to be able to learn offline but I don't mind some cutting and pasting and rearranging material to get it into the format I want. Some sites make this more difficult than others

- I really like a proper English translation.

- Audio is very desirable

3. I certainly haven't used all (or even most) of these sites exhaustively so if your opinions differ, please respond!

4. I'm not affiliated with any of these sites and unfortunately nobody has (yet) attempted to bribe me.

5. If there are any suggestions for useful intermediate websites. I'd love to hear about them.

Finally, thanks to chinese-forums as I first heard of many of these sites on this forum.

Now for the reviews, in no particular order at all.

1. CSLPod.com

This site has four levels - elementary, intermediate, upper-intermediate and advanced levels. You do need to register to access everything but registration is free. I've looked mostly at the intermediate level.

The podcast is built around a short dialogue and the audio is easily downloadable. A pdf of the dialogue plus a few extra items, but not the whole podcast, is also available. The dialogue itself, along with pinyin and an English translation, is also available online. The translation is at best rough. However users are welcome to provide their own and these are usually a lot better. There are also user translations for several languages other than English.

While there is a lot to recommend CSLPod, it does have some shortcomings. The biggest is the disconnect between the level of the dialogue and the level of the podcast. The dialogue is short and relatively easy to understand. However the podcast, which is entirely in Chinese is much tougher. In fact, even after looking up lots of things in a dictionary, I still have to resort to asking a tame native speaker. I haven't looked at ChinesePod for a long time but I'd say that the CSLPod intermediate dialogues are easier than ChinesePod intermediate but the podcast is quite a bit more difficult. Stepping down to CSLPod "beginner" level wasn't very helpful because here the podcasts seemed simply to be repeating the dialogue very, very slowly.

Putting aside the difficulty level, the actual content of the podcast itself is very good. It discusses each new vocabulary item in detail and gives lots of examples. There is much less nonsense than on ChinesePod but it’s still entertaining enough and the audio quality is good. I do suspect it may become a little repetitive if you're using this extensively as the dialogues almost always seem to be a short conversation between Huzi (male)and Qingqing (female)

The website itself is easy to navigate but does have a few quirks, for example; the new vocabulary items have the English translation as well as a short explanation in Chinese (nice feature!) but you have to re-enter the lesson through the main menu using the Chinese option to pick up the Chinese explanation.

2. Chinese-tools.com

This aims to have 40 lessons but only 30 have been completed and it looks like progress has stopped

There are 3 or 4 very short dialogues for each lesson and 20-30 new vocabulary items. The dialogues have Pinyin and an English translation. Each lesson also has a grammar explanation and some substitution drills. The lessons build progressively as new vocabulary is repeated in later lessons. The 30 lessons use a total of 591 characters. The audio is of acceptable quality and clearly read, not too fast.

No files of the lessons are available. The last few lessons are really badly formatted on the screen. In fact they are unusable unless you cut and paste and rearrange them offline in yourself

This is really a beginner level course but I'm finding it useful to review and am using it as a basis for "shadowing" or "chanting" along with audio to try and build up my ability to speak. I do hope they complete the last 10 lessons but I have my doubts.

3 www.zhongwenred, www.zhongwengreen and www.zhongwenblue

Each colour aims to have 120 lessons. A lesson consists of:

- a new vocabulary item (usually only one)

- a short explanation

- a conversation

- seven sample sentences using the new vocabulary item

However, this is very much a "work in progress" and it seems that the progress has stopped. Zhongwenred is the most complete with 111 lessons. Zhongwengreen has 59 and Zhongwenblue only 38. Most of these lessons don't have an explanation or conversation, so they really consist of the just seven sample sentences. Furthermore the vocabulary items are the same across the colours, e.g. lesson 37 in Zhongwenred, Zhongwengreen and Zhongwenblue each introduce the Chinese for "pronunciation".

This may all sound rather useless but I actually like this site quite a lot.

- it's a good source of short, simple sample sentences; there are over 1400 altogether

- I find it helpful to see the new word used in many different sample sentences as I think this helps reinforce the word.

- the sample sentences seem to build on the vocabulary learned previously, so there is some reinforcement.

- each lesson has Chinese, Pinyin, English and direct (i.e. word for word) English.

- each lesson has a pdf

- there are also audio files for the majority of the available lessons. There is often more than one file, with a different reader for each file so you get to hear the whole lesson read by different voices

- the website layout is very clear and simple

In terms of difficulty, Zhongwenred has 825 unique characters. The green and blue don't add much more which is mostly because they are presenting the same material as zhongwenred just in a very slightly different way. There are a further 50 new characters in zhongwengreen and just 4 additional ones in zhongwenblue.

4. Daydayupchinese.com

This looks to be related to zhongwenred, green and blue. The sites are linked although there is no explicit mention that they are developed by the same people.

This is even more of a work in progress than the zhongwen site, which is a great pity as it looks promising. There are supposed to be 5 stages but there is nothing in the last 3 stages and even the first stage isn't complete.

5. SlowChinese.com

This is a Podcast with Chinese character Transcript available.

The audio is very good and the reading is slow and clear.

I find the few podcasts I've listened to be really interesting. However, they are definitely above my level. While I was able to understand them with the help of a dictionary, there is simply too much new in each podcast to make this useful to me. However, I'll definitely be coming back here when my Chinese is better because I think the guy who is doing this has really turned out an excellent product.

6. MIT Opencourseware

http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/web/courses/courses/index.htm#ForeignLanguagesandLiteratures

This offers 4 semesters worth of Chinese courses. You can download each semester as a package to view in your browser offline. However you need to download any audio or video separately.

I haven't spent too much time with this. It looks very good but a huge drawback for me is that the characters are taught completely separately from the main lessons. This means that the textbook is only English and Pinyin. This is a great pity as the textbook itself looks quite comprehensive with a lot of examples.

7. http://chinese.rutgers.edu

This is another course that is squarely intended at being used online. It is broken down into 4 levels as follows:

Level 1 part 1 has 20 lesson

Level 1 part 2 has 15 lessons

Level 2 has 15 lessons

Level 3 has 20 lessons

Level 4 has 10 lessons

I've looked mostly at the first level.

Each lesson consists of the following

- a dialogue in Chinese characters with audio (both traditional and simplified are available but on separate pages)

- an article in Chinese characters with audio (likewise with both traditional and simplified on separate pages)

- pinyin for the dialogue and article

- English translations of dialogue an article

- grammar notes and further examples

Each of these is available on a different webpage. Navigation is a little awkward and it's not immediately obvious that all of this available - at least it wasn't to me. However once you've figured out it's easy enough.

The dialogue and articles tend to be a little dry. Within each lesson, they also both use the same new vocabulary. I rather like this because you can learn the new stuff using one and the test yourself with the other The grammar notes are very extensive. Level 1 part 1 uses 428 unique characters and level 1 part 2 adds a further 452.

From browsing the upper levels, it seems that much less is provided - the pinyin, the English translation and the grammar notes. Even in the last few lessons of Level 1 part 2, there is just a dialogue and no article.

8. Uiowa collections

http://collections.uiowa.edu/chinese/index.html

This site is aimed at testing reading skills but audio is available for each lesson. There are beginner, intermediate and advanced levels. Each level has 30 units with 10 lessons in each unit - so, 300 readings per level, which isn't too shabby. I've looked mostly at the beginner level.

This is another site that doesn't want to be used offline so no pdf's are available and there is no downloadable audio. You are given a text to read and asked questions and a reading score is calculated based on the speed and correctness of your answers. The test also contains a vocabulary list along with English and Pinyin. Unfortunately the window that the reading appears in is painfully small. Before and after each lesson, there is also a test of words (these are not part of the new vocabulary)but there is no help if you get them wrong. If you don't want to go through the test, you can simply click on the audio and see the full text in a decent sized window as well as listen to the audio. Audio quality is sometimes poor.

As indicated, the collection is large and the "beginner" level covers a lot of ground. There are over 2200 unique characters(1277 in the first 10 units, a further 662 in the next 10 and 457 in the final 10.)There are also around 2000 new or "tested" vocabulary items at the beginner level.

9 .gloss.dliflc.edu

This site covers many languages, including Mandarin. The items are not really in lesson form but are articles or dialogues aimed at improving reading and/or listening. They are graded into 4 difficulty levels with almost 600 "lessons" altogether. I looked mostly at the first level.

This site really does intend you to use everything only as each lesson appears in a pop-up window. I wasn't too interested in following this but it does offer text in Chinese (occasionally with traditional characters too), a vocabulary list and a full English translation. Audio is available for most items although the quality isn't always great and it's not downloadable . One cannot connect to website from within China. It also does seem to be down quite often.

While the content is varied and interesting, even level 1 looks a bit tough with just too much new material for me. I imagine this would be a very useful resource for someone whose Chinese is better than mine.

10. http://www.ctcfl.ox.ac.uk/Chinese/lessons/1/

I’ve included this site because although I haven’t used it much, it looks very good. It has 22 lessons with video, Chinese, pinyin and English but no downloads. Altogether 544 characters are covered.

There are also accompanying grammar notes and tests, with hints, answers and notes on the answers. These are the best tests I’ve seen online.

I can’t find a link to this site on the main page so, you probably need to type the url directly. However, the main page does have links to other bits of information, including more advanced Chinese materials which I didn’t find too useful.

11. Nciku.com

Apart from its very useful dictionary function, Nciku also has short dialogues on many topics, complete with pinyin and English. Often there are a variety of dialogues around the same topic which I really like as you get to see variatons on a theme which i find really helpful. The downfall is the audio which seems to be computer generated and in a few cases unintelligible.

Recommended though if you don't need the audio.

That's all.

[AxelManbow]

That's a long, but very useful post. Thanks!

[necroflux]

Always good to see an updated list of resources, very helpful - thanks!!

[Chris333]

Excellent post, thanks!

6. MIT Opencourseware

http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/web/course...andLiteratures

This offers 4 semesters worth of Chinese courses. You can download each semester as a package to view in your browser offline. However you need to download any audio or video separately.

I haven't spent too much time with this. It looks very good but a huge drawback for me is that the characters are taught completely separately from the main lessons. This means that the textbook is only English and Pinyin. This is a great pity as the textbook itself looks quite comprehensive with a lot of examples.

I had no idea MIT made this much information publicly available...and I'm not only talking about the Chinese courses. If you browse that site you'll see there's a TON of free material. I'll certainly be spending some time there.

-Chris

[Bob161]

Hedgepig,

Thank you very much for this post! I am looking to become a linguist for the military and the DLIFLC link will be an excellent heads up for the sort of course work I can expect if I can make it in!

[wrbt]

Since no one else has said it.... GREAT POST. Thanks for it.

Your goals for material are very similar to mine, with possible exception that downloadable audio is an absolute must for me, and English translations I can do without.

Interestingly some resources that have transcripts in PDF are less useful to me, as my usual tactic is to use firefox plug in to hover over words I don't know for translation. Sure can be done with PDF but additional (and acute) pain in the ass.

Also = Agree on slowchinese, I love that site man. It seems the lessons do vary a lot depending on the topic, one topic can be covering something more contemporary and I'll find myself looking up 15 words, the next one about Chinese mythology and I'm looking up 50 words including many I'll never remember and likely never use again unless I'm writing a thesis on Chinese literature.

I was talking with someone at work about the suckage of some sites that have audio you can't download, he insists it can be done with VLC media player capturing the stream then writing to disk in whatever format you want. I've used VLC and it definitely sounds like something it could do, might be worth a try.

Edited March 19, 2010 at 09:10 PM by wrbt

[HedgePig]

wrbt: Have you tried Freecorder? It's an add-in which works with both Firefox and Explorer and captures whatever is being sent to your speaker.

Occasionally it breaks up the source file into several components - I'm not sure why but sometimes simply re-recording solves the problem. If not, I've stitched these together with Audicity. I did try VLC and found it a bit tricky to set up - I can't actually remember if I ever got it working. VLC may do more but if you just want to capture audio, Freecorder is pretty straightforward.

Bon161: The DLIFLC is indeed good. I think it's variety is the greatest stength. I like the fact that apart from the more usual stiff it has things like "written material" such as museum hours, instructions for HSK exam, public park notices, etc.

A coiple of further notes:

((1) MIT courseware. I found that after downloading, I could't open the main page 2nd level course in either Firefox or Explorer. However, when I went down into the lessons, I could open these and then follow links back up to the main page. Levels 1,3 and 4 seemed fine though. (And I still can't believe that the textbook has no characters!)

(2) CTCFL has some nice grammar notes. I like there notes on the use 了and in I particular this test on the aspectual use of 了.

http://www.ctcfl.ox.ac.uk/Lang%20work/Aspect%20index.htm

You are offered several places in a sentence to put in the 了 and best of all it tells you why you are wrong!

[thekhanon]

Chris333,

There are a number of Universities which have begun offering coursework online at no cost. Try Googling "opencourseware" and you'll find that this movement is gaining momentum. A couple of good sites for this are: http://www.ocwconsortium.org/ and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenCourseWare

[Meng Lelan]

Also worthy of mention is PopUp Chinese. Slow Chinese excels over everything else I've seen in terms of materials for intermediate and advanced students, PopUp is appropriate for beginners and intermediate learners. The writing lessons are quite good.