Five Web Resources for Learning Chinese
Before I got too tired to study in my free time, I had looked up a lot of ways to expose myself to as much Chinese as possible. Well, I could walk down the street and accomplish that, but it’s a little less intimidating to find ways to practice inside before going outside. Here are some of the tools I found particularly helpful on my journey to move beyond “ni hao.”
1. Perapera-kun Firefox Add-on
If you’re serious about turning your computer into a Chinese-learning station, the best thing you can do is install this add-on for Firefox. With it, you can highlight Chinese characters anywhere in the browser, bringing up a small window with the pinyin and meaning. It’s worth making the crossover to Firefox just for this.
2. Google Gadgets: Word of the Day
And if you haven’t already set iGoogle as your homepage, do so now. I can wait. Some of the widgets you can add to this customizable front page are “Chinese word of the day” applications, and there are a lot of them. Since the words aren’t always useful (why so many math terms?), it’s helpful to have a few of them on there.
3. Chinese Character Flashcards
Learning characters may not be high on your list of priorities, but if you’re itching to impress your friends, this is a great start. It will let you choose what sets of characters to drill (based on their difficulty) and whether to use traditional or simplified characters. The pinyin and English meaning are also given.
4. Serge Melnyk’s Podcasts
Serge Melnyk has already released a huge number of theme-related podcasts that are great to play in the background. Finding this website should be like a gold mine for you. Unfortunately, his voice has seriously gotten on my nerves, but the vocabulary and grammar rules introduced in each lesson are very valuable.
5. Chinese Course Sentences
Chinese-Course.com has a huge list of sentences that use a lot of common wording. The sentences are only displayed in Chinese characters and English, though, so you’ll need to pair this one up with the Perapera-kun add-on to get the most out of it. Together, they make a great resource for studying sentence structure.
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Responses to “Five Web Resources for Learning Chinese”
Comments RSS Feed – All CommentsHopfrog — 18 October 2009 @ 9:21 am
Thanks for this Clark, will be adding your suggestions. I think Serge stopped podcasting though, I have all of his and I never see new ones on itunes.
Clark — 18 October 2009 @ 9:37 am
Oh, I should point out that the Perapera-kun plugin has compatibility issues with Firefox 3.5. I think a workaround exists, but I’ve just been using an older version of Firefox to be able to run it.
Bill — 19 October 2009 @ 1:55 am
Clark, thanks for the list. I stopped using the Perapera-kun plugin because of the compatability issues. I might have to go in search of that workaround.
I wrote a similar post on my blog (Top 5 Tools for Studying Chinese) although not all of them are online tools. Since I wrote the post, my toolset has changed a little so maybe it is time I wrote an update.
Clark — 19 October 2009 @ 8:13 am
Nice list, Bill. I didn’t know about some of those tools before. As for Perapera-kun, the author has a temporary fix posted on his website. I can’t verify whether or not this works.
Ameya — 29 October 2009 @ 3:21 pm
Oh my god, thank you for the link to Perapera-kun !! I had it years ago (before i even started chinese class) and for some reason, for the life of me, i could NOT find it again! YAY! You’ve made my life a lot easier!
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