From the about page: Phonemica is a crowd-sourced project to record spoken stories in every one of the thousands of varieties of Chinese. We believe that each language and dialect is a priceless... Read more.

phonemica.net

A discussion about the recent disappearance of the Malaysia Airways flight. 锵锵三人行 is one of my favourite programs, always good content and the host is awesome. There are transcripts available, too. Read more.

v.ifeng.com

Chinese Idioms or Chengyu are short sayings usually consisting of four characters. Unless you know the story and its common usage, a Chengyu will sound like random nonsense. Here are some Chengyu ... Read more.

chinese-tools.com

How should we learn Chinese grammar? There are many, many different ways of approaching grammar, both from a theoretical point of view and from a practical, student perspective. Because this is suc... Read more.

hackingchinese.com

Serge Gorodish describes himself as "Mathematician, father, programmer, amateur linguist, cynic/idealist, and all-around nice guy" and has found a way to split pinyin syllables in components, which... Read more.

countryoftheblind.blogspot.de

This article on Sinoglot describes the earthly branches, why they are useful and how to memorise them (using the fingers). Read more.

sinoglot.com

This article introduces the heavenly stems along with an interesting way to memorise them (using the fingers). It also deals briefly with why they are useful to know. The heavenly stems are quite u... Read more.

sinoglot.com

What's a dialect? What's a language? Are Mandarin, Cantonese and Wu different languages or are they dialects of the same language. The answer is that there is no answer, it depends. This is a short... Read more.

sinoglot.com

This is an application which displays words one at a time in rapid succession, thus (at least in theory) enabling you to read more quickly since you don't have to move your eyes at all. I think thi... Read more.

dheera.net

Douban is one of the most popular online Chinese communities and forums. You can read a wide variety of material - on almost any topic imaginable - from native speakers. It's a wonderful source... Read more.

douban.com

Ever wanted to listen to the clips you've found on YouTube? This tool allows you to convert YouTube clips to mp3 files. This is excellent for listening practice! You can use it for music, commercia... Read more.

listentoyoutube.com

This post on FluentU discusses briefly what to look for in a podcast and then follows up with six recommended podcasts. Some of them were actually new to me and I don't know if the recommended leve... Read more.

fluentu.com

This post opens up with a discussion of learning grammar in Chinese, followed by explanations of thirteen common sentence patterns in Chinese, including examples with translation. I would prefer mo... Read more.

fluentu.com

This post is about 马到成功, one of the idioms used to wish someone success in the year of the horse (it has other uses as well). John Pasden explains what it means and how to use it (and some things a... Read more.

sinosplice.com

In this article, Albert Wolfe of Laowai Chinese talks about handwriting as the fifth skill. The four normal skills are listening, speaking, reading and writing, but he argues that in Chinese, handw... Read more.

laowaichinese.net

Historical artifacts unearthed in China such as golf clubs, fashion accessories, toilet seats, toothbrushes, double-ended lesbian dildos and Google's Android? As usual, chinaSMACK provides parallel... Read more.

chinasmack.com

Talking Chinese dictionary with sample sentences, handwriting recognition, fuzzy pinyin matches, word decomposition, animated stroke order, character etymology, etc. Read more.

yellowbridge.com

This blog-post offers an introduction to the concept of coloured tones in Chinese learning software. Where do the colours come from? Why were they chosen? And what colours should you choose for you... Read more.

laowaichinese.net

Laowai Chinese doesn't update often, but when it does, it's usually worth reading. The blog is about anything related to Chinese and China, but I find posts about vocabulary, grammar and culture th... Read more.

laowaichinese.net

This site offers a reasonably comprehensive character dictionary that includes a few things most other dictionaries don't offer, such as etymology (with pictures) and a list of words a certain char... Read more.

chinese-characters.org

Tips, Tricks, Software, Websites and Lessons to make learning Chinese easier. This is basically an aggregator that collects blog-posts and new updates from a large variety of sites related to learn... Read more.

netvibes.com

This website offers a large number of previous HSK and YCT Chinese proficiency tests, sorted by year and level. This is excellent for test preparation and/or benchmarking. Read more.

chinesetest.cn

Chinese-English and English-Chinese dictionary with Chinese handwriting recognition, pinyin translation, audio pronunciation, personalized vocab lists, picture theme words and useful Chinese conver... Read more.

nciku.com

Chinese-forums is the best place to go online if you have questions about Chinese or want to browse through threads where other people (some of them very knowledgeable indeed) discuss Chinese and r... Read more.

chinese-forums.com

This website offers a large number of sentences, just search for any character or word and you can view hundreds of examples of how it's used in Chinese. This is mostly useful once you have the bas... Read more.

jukuu.com

This is the website home of the Hanping Chinese Android apps. While the Android apps contain all the Chinese language-learning functionality, the website provides useful app showcasing, FAQs and ap... Read more.

hanpingchinese.com

The World of Chinese is a magazine and website that offers a wealth of information about Chinese language and culture. They also have an active Twitter feed you should check out. This is their offi... Read more.

theworldofchinese.com

This page describes the basics of how Pinyin works (i.e. how sounds are written, not necessarily how they are pronounced). It deals with problems such as when to add dots over u, false initials, om... Read more.

talkbank.org

The question of how to design flashcards is faced by all learners who use them. What should you put on the front? What should you put on the back? Should you add single characters or whole words? O... Read more.

hackingchinese.com

This site simply lists the 3000 most common characters in Chinese, including simplified, traditional and English translation. The list also includes some extra information about word formation and ... Read more.

zein.se

Skritter is an app for learning Chinese vocabulary, especially handwriting. It offers smooth handwriting input with some corrective feedback, combined with spaced repetition that allows you (or me,... Read more.

hackingchinese.com

Pleco is one of the most popular mobile dictionaries for Chinese learners. It basically removes the need for any kind of paper dictionary and allows easy look-up for words using English, hand-writi... Read more.

pleco.com

This is the most active discussion group on Reddit for discussing questions related to the Chinese language. Most posts here are questions about Chinese, so if you already know a bit, you can help ... Read more.

reddit.com

Numbers in Chinese can be very frustrating sometimes, mostly because the number system isn't a 1:1 matching with English, so apart from learning the words for different numbers, you also need to ad... Read more.

en.wikipedia.org

This is a basic but fairly comprehensive overview of the phonology of Standard Chinese (or Mandarin, as it might be better known as). This site covers consonants, vowels, syllables, tones, word str... Read more.

en.wikipedia.org

This is a story about looking Chinese but not knowing how to speak Chinese. It's an eye-opener for people who don't look Chinese and study Chinese, but it might also be painfully familiar for stude... Read more.

youtube.com

This article focuses on listening ability and is fairly comprehensive. I have written about most of this before on Hacking Chinese, but this is a better overview than anything else I’ve written pre... Read more.

fluentu.com

This is John Pasden's site about learning Chinese. Apart from the various resources shown on this page, he also writes one of the longest-running and most popular blogs about learning Chinese and l... Read more.

sinosplice.com

Stack Exchange is a site where people can ask questions to the community and get answers back. These answers are then rated by other people in the community and the most helpful answer can be chose... Read more.

chinese.stackexchange.com

Create your own Chinese calligraphy with a character, a word, a sentence or any text. Choose the size, style, orientation, simplified or traditional Chinese characters. This tool offers a wide vari... Read more.

chinese-tools.com

Get your own unique and personalized Chinese Seal, with your name or any sentence. This tool is useful if you want to create a generic Chinese-looking logo or seal for almost any purpose. There are... Read more.

chinese-tools.com

This is a neat little tool that converts pin1yin1 with numbers to pīnyīn with tone marks. Very simple, very useful. Read more.

lexilogos.com

This is the second article I’ve written for FluentU and it’s focused on the topic of capacity management. The main ideas here are not limited to language learning, actually, but is part of the much... Read more.

fluentu.com

A 50-minute long animated version of the Legend of the White Snake. This is an excellent way of learning about famous Chinese stories without spending too much effort reading about them. There are ... Read more.

youtube.com

This is a collection of several Chinese corpora that can be quite useful if you're looking for detailed information about collocations and the like. Simply entering a word will give you sentences, ... Read more.

corpus.leeds.ac.uk

My third freelance article written for the FluentU Chinese language learning blog. This time I talk about comprehensible input, scaffolding and offer some concrete guidelines for how to make immers... Read more.

fluentu.com

As far as I know, this isn’t the kind of music 弦子 is typically associated with (I’ve checked some of the other albums and didn’t like them at all). This song is quite good, though, even though her ... Read more.

youtube.com

王菲 is extremely well-known in China (or in the West as Faye Wong) and has a marvellous voice, here used to create something darker and leaning more towards rock. Very good indeed. The lyrics make t... Read more.

youtube.com

This is the Chinese version of the popular Skeptoid.com podcast that deals with urban legends and myths from a scientific perspective. The Chinese version is well-produced and the content is transl... Read more.

skeptoid.com.cn

This is by far the best dictionary for people who learn Chinese in Taiwan, at least when you reach the intermediate level (many entries lack English). There is also an app you can use and there's r... Read more.

moedict.tw

This is one of the most useful dictionaries online. The fact that it's also linked to 百度百科 (a sort of Chinese Wikipedia), the information available here is next to endless. Since most is in Chinese... Read more.

dict.baidu.com

This is my favourite free online Chinese-Chinese dictionary. it offers a lot of words with detailed explanations, along with examples. I use it for all kinds of Chinese-Chinese look-ups, especially... Read more.

zdic.net

Arch Chinese offers quite a lot of features (Worksheets, Flashcards, Pinyin Table, Radicals, Tools), but the most useful thing is still the dictionary. It offers sound, stroke animations and, most ... Read more.

archchinese.com

I first used this dictionary during my first semester of Chinese and I have kept using it ever since. It has pretty good information about character etymology and provides more accurate information... Read more.

zhongwen.com