Best of Chinese Study Tools, Studying Chinese Online and Off

[Sam Addington]

@trev: I hadn't looked at it yet. It looks interesting. How would you recommend I familiarize myself with it. It is a bit intimidating because it has no "dumbed down" explanation of procedure. And I'm not sure how to download a whole list of files and form it into a usable whole. I have a feeling that once I learn I would like it better than the others. I will sign up as a member I guess.

Tell me what you like about it.

[renzhe]

I've added the HSK vocabulary files for Mnemosyne/Anki, KVoctrain/Parley, Supermemo and in the universal TSV format.

The question comes up all the time.

[Marceau]

I'd like to suggest Lingoes for inclusion in the list. It's free software that comes with a good deal of dictionaries that can be used offline, as well as direct access to online dictionaries. I use it both as a cursor translator and as a windowed dictionary. It's frankly the best dictionary software I've used in my life. It was recommended to me by my personal tutor. Mind you, I'm not associated with the software in any way.

Website: Lingoes

Though the website is in Chinese, rest assured that the software can be used with a decent English interface.

[atitarev]

What happened to the Wiki functionality?

Please add:

Language Exchange Community (http://sharedtalk.com) to Language Partners

[roddy]

See here - I'm keen to hear what people think.

[Xiao Kui]

'd like to suggest Lingoes for inclusion in the list. It's free software that comes with a good deal of dictionaries that can be used offline, as well as direct access to online dictionaries. I use it both as a cursor translator and as a windowed dictionary. It's frankly the best dictionary software I've used in my life. It was recommended to me by my personal tutor. Mind you, I'm not associated with the software in any way.

Website: Lingoes

Though the website is in Chinese, rest assured that the software can be used with a decent English interface.

There's also an English website, wish I knew abt this before I spent money on Babylon! Does anyone who's used both know how the 2 compare?

http://www.lingoes.net/

[DVD00]

Hi,

I just wanted to pipe in a bit here, stating what is free (as of Dec 8, 2008) for the iTouch / iPhone users.

Dictionaries:

KTdict C-E - probably the best. Input is automatically updated. Just good, period

DianHua - a powerful, basic dictionary

PowerWord (Basic) - also very good, allows you to keep a list of characters you have looked up. Does not, however, provide pinyin guidance (the others do. Seems more biased towards the Mandarin speaker seeking English help

Games, etc

Wordsearch - very addictive. Divided into common expressions, must-know words and even food, this matching game gently re-inforces your learning. You can test memory by either playing the game with English only (guess the Chinese characters) or pinyin or combinations of English, Chinese and pinyin. Either way, very useful. have asked author to put in some more 'Northern' Chinese expressions. Let's see if we can get an 'er' or two.

掌中故事 Lite (zhang zhong zuo shi) is a story application. You van use this a few times - until you're bored - to practice reading.

Lonely Planet English to Mandarin Audio Phrasebook - yes, with audio, comprehensive for whatever situation a traveler may find themselves in. For both the newcomer baffled by new situations and refreshing for the experienced... who want to say things like the textbook had taught them.

No, I don't work for apple, but I would highly recommend these free applications for the serious or part-time student of Chinese. Off course if you want to spend money there are many applications that allow you to do that.

DVD

[Marceau]

Wordsearch - very addictive. Divided into common expressions, must-know words and even food, this matching game gently re-inforces your learning. You can test memory by either playing the game with English only (guess the Chinese characters) or pinyin or combinations of English, Chinese and pinyin. Either way, very useful. have asked author to put in some more 'Northern' Chinese expressions. Let's see if we can get an 'er' or two.

Do you have a link for that? I can't seem to find it, though it sounds good.

[Gaogao]

Hi!

I regularly post to Lang-8. It´s an online language community where native speakers can correct your journal written in your target language. I really love this site, it helped to improve my writing a lot. http://lang-8.com/

Though it´s not Chinese-specialised, there is a huge number of Chinese member, so you usually get your posts corrected within 5 minutes....

[Guili]

I have been looking for a website for half an hour now which,if you write for example: sui ran.....dan shi-it gives a lot of examples,somebody wrote here,but don't remember the link,

it is sth like: jooku djuuku,jduko...............

please help,if anybody knows write it here,it helped me a lot,but now I can;t find it:help:help:help:help:help:help:help:help:help:help:help:help:help:help:help:help:help

[roddy]

www.jukuu.com/ - one of leeyah's favourites I think.

[Guili]

Roddy,you are always there ,when smb needs help,I am so grateful to you,many thanks :clap :clap

[Kai13]

Does anyone know if there are any websites with exercises? From basic to advanced.

[dfunkyfresh]

From my 5 years experience of learning Chinese and living in Shanghai, I found these very useful:

Hanzibar (10USD): http://realimaginary.com/hanzibar/

Chinup Chinese Popup Translator 0.1 (FREE) https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4007

I like hanzibar better, just because it's easier on my eyes, has a few more functions than "chinup" and seems to be updated more often.

www.italki.com - can find a gizillion Chinese language partners.

http://dict.cn/ - is the best dictionary because it provides so many sentence examples and you can double click on any Chinese character and up pops pinyin and english.

http://25minutefluency.com/ - free video course that shows some neat tricks, like using wikipedia as an enormous CH-ENG dictionary, and other things that aren't mentioned in this forum.

A good annotation tool, dictionary, language partner, and a few other tricks (like the wikipedia one) can really jump start you chinese level.

[creamyhorror]

Hanzibar (10USD): http://realimaginary.com/hanzibar/

Chinup Chinese Popup Translator 0.1 (FREE) https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4007

I like hanzibar better, just because it's easier on my eyes, has a few more functions than "chinup" and seems to be updated more often.

Chinup is madly outdated (2006!!), you'd probably be better served by Chinesepera-kun, Mandarin Popup, or any of the other free Chinese popup dictionary addons for Firefox. Don't know about Hanzibar, but it doesn't seem particularly different from the free ones (except for the big fat bar )

[vicky20jak]

hi everybody. i am from india and new to the forum. I have been learning chinese for almost about a year. i wanted some tools learning chinese. maybe i am repeating the question, but the results that i found here are mainly focussed on windows OS. i am using mas os x 1.6. please help me in getting the following for free.

1. i wanted an OCR software that can convert images having chinese (simplified) characters into text. looking for readiris pro/corporate asian version, but not finding it..anyone has a better alternative or can help me with this software?

2. a mouse over software that can give the meaning of chinese characters in safari while surfing chinese websites.

3. any other helpful softwares for mac os.

thanks in anticipation.

[Rypervenche]

I would like to add an addition to the dictionary section.

http://dict.fareast.com.tw/

The Far East Book Company (遠東圖書公司) is THE best source for learning traditional characters. As I am interested in Taiwan, I use their books and they are simply amazing. This site uses their database for Chinese-English and English-Chinese definitions.

For those interested in learning traditional characters, you can see find some good dictionaries here: http://www.taiwanderful.net/guides/dictionaries-chinese-language-learners . There is also a new book from the Far East Book Company called Far East 3000 Chinese Character Dictionary, which I recently saw in a book store and I am going to buy it ASAP. It has the stroke order for them all as well as the readings, it is simply awesome.

Another site that I use EVERY SINGLE DAY is Taiwan's Ministry of Education's stroke order website.

http://stroke-order.learningweb.moe.edu.tw/about_program.jsp

It is written in English here and gives all of the ways to look up a characters, whether by pinyin, zhuyin, radical, stroke count...

*note* The entire Taiwan government server is currently down (since only this morning), but I would assume that it will be up and running very soon. If the link does not work, just wait a little while. I will edit this post once they have fixed the problem.

Please add these two links to the first post if possible. If anyone has questions for me, please do not hesitate to send me a private message. I would love to help anying who is learning Mandarin, whether simplified or traditional characters. I have a CRAPload of sites for learning.^^

[chrix]

I'm reasonably happy with the paper dictionaries from Far Eastern I have, so thanks for posting the link, I'll check it out. I hope though that the online version has more words...

I use two of the MOE dictionaries every day, http://dict.revised.moe.edu.tw/ and http://dict.idioms.moe.edu.tw/ The server is down from time to time, but comes back online quickly, so no need to worry too much about it, it's just annoying when you need to know something real quick...

[chrix]

Now the Far East server seems to be down, but from what I have seen before it went down, I must say it's quite disappointing.

I have both Chinese-English and English-Chinese paper dictionaries published by them in a very compact format, making them very convenient to carry around, and the web site falls far short of that. So what use does a website have that offers even less than the printed dictionaries?

A case in point, take the character 忙: while the paper dictionary has a number of definitions as you would expect from a dictionary, "1. busy; short of time; fully occupied, 2. hurried; in haste; to make haste" the website only gives "busy". This is not a dictionary, but merely a word list On the Chinese-English side it's a bit better, if you look up "busy" it gives a couple of definitions, but it is still less than the paper dictionary gives for the same word.

A problem of the paper dictionaries is that they don't include any examples, and before I could evaluate whether the website might make up for that shortcoming, it went down.

I'll edit my review after the website goes back online, but at this point my tentative conclusion is clear: if you need a Taiwan-based C-E E-C dictionary, use the one at www.yahoo.com.tw

[skritterdoug]

I would suggest (then again, I am biased as I work for the site), that Skritter (see http://www.skritter.com/ and http://www.skritter.com/demo) be added. Other posters have mentioned it as a tool they have used (http://www.chinese-forums.com/showpost.php?p=221018&postcount=57).

It's a great tool for learning Hanzi and helps out quite a bit with tone, definition and listening practice. It is designed to get your vocabulary up and should ideally be used along with some other learning program (follow the vocab from a textbook your class is using, characters you run across while living in China, words from podcasts, etc.) I could not have progressed as quickly as I have without it.