Current favorite online Chinese resources (CP excepted)

On the whole CP are doing a job no other website can measure up to. I wish they would do less of it though and do more quality control on details, because pondering on things that don't add up causes  considerable waste of time. Maybe producing 3 times as much material as anyone (even full-time students) can keep up with makes  sense in terms of CP's business model. As for me (a part-time student admittedly), even if CP stopped dead  producing fresh lessons right now, I would still have plenty of work on my plate just catching up for the next X years.

I notice that CP pop-up translations have recently become particularly unreliable; it seemed to coincide with Pete's departure.  Have they replaced Pete with a machine? 

I just discovered http://lang-8.com, where you write journal entries in any language you are learning, and native speakers and more advanced learners correct your mistakes and offer suggestions.  In turn, you read and correct other peoples' entries. Great resource! 

jckeith,

"but Perakun is not compatible with the latest version of Firefox."

..I'm not sure about that.I upgraded my Firefox to the latest version when the latest big change occured about a month or two ago and had to also update perakin with a patch or something and it's been working fine since.Unless things have changed in the last couple of weeks or so...

calicartel,

"CP's in-house pop-ups are becoming anachronic."

..can't comment on any in-house popups in the last week or so as been awol,but I tend to view these things as complementary.For example there are times when I've used perakin popup over the in-house ones to get further breakdown of multicharacter words,but perakun is far from perfect and having a couple of translations is very helpful.Some users,particularly newbies won't immediately have other popups at their fingertips and going to another site for the translations is more time consuming.Also,CPod will be fully aware of the context that the words have been used in and thus in the best position for the most appropriate translation,though if it is true what you say that they have been recently just been deferring to the first translation that comes along in mdbg then I agree with you that that will not be helpful [and could in fact be misleading].I'm surprised that they would do this unless it's a temporary measure with the looming holidays.Can anyone confirm the veracity of this?

Returning to the Firefox toolbar, I now think it's great. You can use it in CP dialogues, it then sort of overwrites the CP pop-ups. If you don't want it to overwrite the CP pop-ups, you just click on the enable/disable button. Incidentally, I now suspect I know why the CP pop-ups are so goofy. They just link to the MDBG dictionary and take the first solution of each entry in that dictionary. Since this is a fully automated process that doesn't cost CP a penny, I don't expect CP to fix the problem as they've promised to. Anyway, with all the tools becoming available on the WWW, CP's in-house pop-ups are becoming anachronic.

I haven't tried Mandarin Popup yet, but Perakun is not compatible with the latest version of Firefox.

I've loaded the Firefox pop-up and it works fine. I wonder though whether it is not slowing down my computer even when in "disabled" mode.

I've been using the MDBG Chinese reader for a while now. I'd say it's unbeatable in terms of helping you understand Chinese characters. It's performance as a piece of software is not so excellent. It's slow to load (well... if you want to call 10 to 15 seconds slow - lol) and while it's loading everything else slows down. I put up with this because the dictionary is so good. (Way better than Perakun.)

Haven't tried the one mbettinson recommends yet, might give it a whirl later on my office computer.

Is the Firefox pop-up as good as the MDBG Chinese reader?

http://de.mdbg.net/chindict/chindict.php?page=chinese_dictionary_windows

The MDBG Chinese reader is not free but it might be way better seeing as the MDBG dictionary is so good. Any tips appreciated.

Sorry for necroing something quite old now but... I saw xiaophil mention Chinese Pera-Kun, the Firefox plug-in. There's actually a *way* better one, quite recently made, called Mandarin Popup.

This is absolutely indispensible and I highly recommend giving it a shot.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/9931

Regarding iMandarinPod

It is possible to order DVDs of older lessons so that they do not "vanish into the ether". I like iMandarinPod as light relief from CP. The reading is slower and everything gets explained and spelled out. Also, the content is old-fashioned (lots of stuff about cultural hightlights and Chinese customs), so it is the ideal complement to CP.

They've been making a major mistake though, which I pointed out to them, namely that of reading out wrong examples in their podcasts. I told them they should only read out the correct form, and maybe describe the wrong form, but under no circumstances should the the wrong form be read out loud! If wrong Chinese is read out alongside correct Chinese, there's a 50% chance the former will stick. At least that's how my mind works when listening to a foreign language course.

I would like to join in on the chorus.  This is a great thread.

I think it is important to go straight to the real Mandarin sometimes.  I go to qq.com, open up a news article, click on my Firefox Chinese pera-kun dictionary and start reading.

Great idea for a thread!

Another great place to discuss all things Chinese: http://www.chinese-forums.com/

Does anyone have a resource for streaming Chinese TV on a Mac?  Everything I try seems very hit or miss.

http://readchinese.nflc.org/?page=home is my current favourite 5-minutes-day thing. It's just little bits and pieces to read, with notes, readings, exercises, etc.

jennayong,

thanks - I really like the archchinese site. I had not seen that one before.

I use www.archchinese.com to learn characters. The user interface is really neat and runs very well on my old PC. The character decomposition is great for me to learn the character components.

Goulniky, on imandarinpod, I guess I like both. 张静 seems to me to be a really good reader--I get mesmerized by her voice. Tragically, the older lessons are being removed as the new ones are posted, so much old stuff is gone into the ether.

BTW, www.chinaknowledge.de has lots and lots...like this page dedicated to the 214 radicals.

yeah the university of oxford website w/ videos that rj&mike posted is awesome. used it extensively in the days before cpod was invented. they haven't changed the site in almost 5 years but the material and presentation is excellent.

www.livemocha.com

you get points for taking quizzes and submitting writing or speaking submissions, also you can correct other people's submissions.  You can also chat with other users.

dzd,

good post. I use all those you mentioned and like them all very much plus popup chinese, nciku, and skritter. Mikeinewshot just mentioned this one and so far I like it also.

http://www.ctcfl.ox.ac.uk/Chinese/lessons.htm

the rest I will have to try out.

doezeedoats, the iMandarinPod.com podcast you checked (good northern male Mandarin accent) is the part I like least. It's the standard, cultural background type of lesson you find in Chinese textbooks. Those recordings also seem repurposed material judging from audio quality.

I much prefer the more recent dialogues or stories with women voices, on lighter topics.

"Pablo" -- This is a great (and free) dict/character search tool, downloadable from this site ...has stroke order animation, character entry using mouse, and a super multi-radical character selection function (like 心 and 月 brings up the short list with 情).

www.lang-8.com. It's basically a language learning based social networking blog site thing. You write entries in the language you're learning, native speakers come along and correct them, you reciprocate. So far I'm finding it to be a highly efficient and rather effective way of practising and getting feedback on my written Chinese, as well as doing a little guanxi. To be recommended!

I looked at chineseetymology.org today. Good site for taking your familiarity with characters to another level. Bronze, seal and oracle bone pics of characters, plus radical breakdown, English meanings, Cantonese and Taiwanese pronunciation...

Ask Benny puts a fun twist on it.  Plus, if you live in Shanghai, you can participate in free events like Mandarin Monday.

I enjoy watching the Happy China videos from www.chinese.cn, previously of www.linese.com and www.confuciusinstitute.net.  Not only is the language they use pretty advanced, but it also includes english and chinese subtitles.  Once they've arrived at a new destination they usually put out several videos a week.

Moreover, the videos are all available for download, have PDF files of the dialogue, and the older downloads allow for downloading the material not just in video format, but also in mp3.

I cheched out imandarinpod.com. Good northern male Mandarin accent on the lesson i tried.

on nciku...

I've noticed just in the last couple of weeks that nciku is enhancing functionality. One recent add is animated stroke order. Also has box to enter characters by drawing with the mouse curser, and every example sentence has a "play" arrow to listen to, which you can set to play automatically three times.

BTW, if you use Firefox and deal with traditional characters at all, it's worth getting the Firefox add-on Fireinput. Paste or type a complex character, select it, right click the mouse and find the trad.->sim. option on the drop-down and, conversion done, you're ready to look it up in nciku (takes @ 2 seconds). Do the same thing in reverse with any word in the nciku page and it converts the entire page to traditional characters. Amazing. Makes it worth switching to Firefox by itself.

One more cool one: This converts pinyin with numbers to pinyin with tone marks, e.g. shui4fu2-> shuì fú (說服):

http://www.chinese-tools.com/tools/converter-pinyin-unicode.html

imandarinpod.com has intermediate-level podcasts 3 times a week, entirely in Chinese with full pdf transcripts, also including background supplements, all free of charge.

topics are typically more conservative than CPod's, but still very useful. Daily listening practice for me in the car (I seldom check the transcripts for lack of time)

already mentioned nciku is a very useful, bi-directional online dictionary, I make systematic use of it in my character maps and news annotations, they also have a mobile interface, nciku mini. Not sure who is behind but it is a very good resource.

• popupchinese (the HSK and listening tests are superb and the lessons are fun, also. Perfect complement to CPod)
  
• skritter (currently massively using that one to refresh my writing skills which have approached zero)
  
• Goulnik's news (I learned tons from those news)
  

I like two sites that have beginners' textbook texts on them. I actually own the Integrated Chinese book (and one of the New PCR) but it's nice to have digital text.

http://www.language.berkeley.edu/ic/ 

http://www.ctcfl.ox.ac.uk/PCR/PCR%20index.htm 

I read these with the help of a Hanzi-to-Pinyin tool that I wrote. It copies the ZDT interface but fixes a few bugs as I find them. For example, H2P tools often convert 说 to shui or don't handle sandhi properly.

Although it's really a tool just for my use, there's an online version and a (Windows) desktop version here:

http://apardoe.spaces.live.com/