When learning to pronounce tones in Chinese, it makes sense to focus on words rather than single syllables. Most words in Chinese are disyllabic and since practising these will also include to tone... Read more.

hackingchinese.com

Listen to native speakers, mimic the audio while recording, receive instant feedback on spoken phases. Then submit your recording to be evaluated by real native teachers. Read more.

waichinese.com

This article describes the basics of way to teach tones that is different from the traditional way mainly in that the third tone is no longer described as a falling-rising tone (since that is rarel... Read more.

sinosplice.com

The third tone is an essentially low tone. The only time it's pronounced with a high element is in front of another third tone (when it turns into a second tone) and when in complete isolation (whi... Read more.

hackingchinese.com

This is the second and final article about using phonetic components to hack Chinese characters and make it considerably easier to handle similarly looking characters. This article describes both t... Read more.

hackingchinese.com

Writing Chinese characters for the first time can be very hard, mostly because it's so different from writing letters. It feels more like drawing a picture than writing! This article is aimed at be... Read more.

hackingchinese.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

This is a basic video demonstration of the stroke order rules for writing Chinese characters. It's short and if you find something lacking, your question may have already been answered in the comme... Read more.

youtube.com

This is a comprehensive overview of measure words in Chinese, featuring a long list of the most common ones, an explanation in English how they are used and a number of examples of words they are u... Read more.

digchinese.com

Audacity is a marvellous piece of software that allows you to record audio (yourself, other people or whatever is playing on your computer), mimic native speakers, edit and enhance the audio, as we... Read more.

hackingchinese.com

Many people regard chengyu as the golden key to the Chinese language and believe that learning chengyu will impress native speakers and take their Chinese to the next level. However, learning cheng... Read more.

hackingchinese.com

There are many ways of practising writing Chinese characters and they all have their pros and cons. In this article, I discuss seven different ways of practising and what advantages and disadvantag... Read more.

hackingchinese.com

80% of all Chinese characters are made up of one semantic component (meaning) and one phonetic component (pronunciation). The sheer number of characters formed this way means that these characters ... Read more.

hackingchinese.com

This is a guide to handwriting Chinese characters. It's not about writing beautifully, but writing correctly, including things like stroke placement, length and direction. There are numerous exampl... Read more.

hackingchinese.com

Is it easy to learn to read Chinese? ShaoLan, among others, claims that it is. I don't agree, and in this article I discuss some common trends among people who try to portray Chinese as being easy.... Read more.

hackingchinese.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

"Graded Watching makes watching TV series more approachable for Chinese learners by offering a list of Chinese TV shows on Netflix and Youtube sorted by difficulty, along with a vocabulary list for... Read more.

jiong3.com

This resource presents something fairly unique: handwriting samples from a famous calligrapher (田英章) for all characters in HSK, sorted by level. This includes both regular script (楷书) and semi-curs... Read more.

edsko.net

A podcast collection of Chinese short stories with explanations in Chinese graded to 7 levels. Transcript. Vocabulary list. Free. The explanations are very clear and use repetition and synonyms s... Read more.

learningchinesethroughstories.com

This is the best overview of spaced repetition research I have seen online or offline. It's thorough, well-argued and probably covers more than you were looking for. It's not specifically about Chi... Read more.

gwern.net

Written Chinese characters are regarded by some as the true essence of Chinese; without learning to write by hand, you're not learning Chinese. Others go to extremes in the other direction, claimin... Read more.

hackingchinese.com

Outlier Linguistics hosts an excellent blog with a large number of insightful articles into Chinese characters. Some of them are directly useful because they talk about learning characters, others ... Read more.

outlier-linguistics.com

Tones are more important than most people think. Just because native speakers reduce tones and speak quickly, it doesn't mean that you can do the same and get away with it. Don't be fooled by peopl... Read more.

hackingchinese.com

My article about various common problems students have with Pinyin. These problems mostly exist because people read Pinyin as if it were a phonetic alphabet instead of a transcription system. Read more.

hackingchinese.com

This project aims to create a complete set of high quality and free illustrations to clearly show the stroke orders of Han characters (hanzi, kanji, kana, hantu, and hanja). Read more.

commons.wikimedia.org

This is a neat video that introduces Chinese characters to complete beginners. It's not a substitute for a real lecture on how characters work, but this is still the best introduction I have seen s... Read more.

youtube.com

This is a simple and straightforward explanation of Chinese phonetics. I recommend it because it's not very complicated and (mostly) correct. I will try to write something myself later, but in the ... Read more.

zein.se

This website and podcast offer theme-based, progressive online audio lessons. There are transcripts, worksheets, mobile apps, videos and more. Not all of this content is free, but the beginning of ... Read more.

melnyks.com

Explode Chinese characters into their building blocks; visualize and remember how they are formed. Read more.

characterpop.com

Want to learn about Chinese proverbs? Here are detailed explanations of 10 Chinese proverbs that will inspire you. Read more.

fluentu.com

There are currently around 80 videos here that introduces vocabulary and phrases in Chinese. They are mostly idiomatic expressions or other words that typically don't appear in textbooks, so that's... Read more.

youtube.com

Evaluating pronunciation needn't be hard, but many methods commonly used by teachers are deeply flawed, resulting in inaccurate error analysis. If we want to improve, we need to be clear about what... Read more.

hackingchinese.com

John Pasden has over ten years of experience teaching Chinese language, and a particular awareness of phonetic difficulties. This page gathers a number of posts on his website sinosplice about pron... Read more.

sinosplice.com

This site (originally a book) explains the difference between commonly mixed up (traditional) characters, published by Taiwan's Ministry of Education. As it says in the introduction, the main purpo... Read more.

language.moe.gov.tw

Outlier Linguistics Dictionary of Chinese characters is an excellent tool to help you understand and thereby learn Chinese characters more effectively. It gives you instant access to the latest res... Read more.

outlier-linguistics.com

Around 6,000 simplified characters without definition or Pinyin, but with clickable links to more information about each character. Not specified what data this list is based on. This resource w... Read more.

hanzicraft.com

This list is based on Chinese movie subtitles and is thus as close to natural spoken language as you can get. 100,000 simplified words without definition or Pinyin, You will find some 这个 and 不能, bu... Read more.

crr.ugent.be

This is a Q&A page where teachers answer questions about Mandarin, mainly vocabulary use and grammar, but sometimes other questions as well. It's mostly useful because of the wealth of information ... Read more.

hwjyw.com

This is a very large list of traditional characters with multiple pronunciations in the form of an Excel file (the other two files are announcements about the list in Chinese). The first sheet just... Read more.

word.hlc.edu.tw

This newly launched site offers basic information about pronunciation, mostly things that should be in all beginner courses and textbooks but seldom are. Currently, the content is fairly limited, b... Read more.

resources.allsetlearning.com

Foreigncy provides daily digital flashcards, with audio, that prepare a user to read a foreign policy or economics from a regional source. The site also provide users with an English language summa... Read more.

foreigncy.org

10 useful vocabulary words related to the Chinese traditional holiday 鬼月(guĭ yuè), the ghost month, Read more.

fluentu.com

HiNative is a Q&A site where you can ask people all over the world about culture, language, anything. We support over 100 languages. Read more.

hinative.com

Duanmu San's "The Phonology of Standard Chinese" is by far the best introduction to Mandarin phonology that I'm aware of. It's mostly useful for people who like phonology or are already at an advan... Read more.

hackingchinese.com

This article on Sinosplice discusses the question of how many characters you actually need to be able to read Chinese (no, the answer isn't 2,000). Of course, the main question is what you want to ... Read more.

sinosplice.com

In a way, learning Chinese characters is very much like learning vocabulary in any foreign language and much of the efficient methods developed there works well for Chinese as well. However, charac... Read more.

hackingchinese.com

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

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 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

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

This article discusses the language power struggle that most learners are very familiar with. "Given a conscious choice between a number of languages to use for interaction, speakers will naturally... Read more.

sinosplice.com

Mastering Chinese characters, whether you find them enchantingly beautiful or overwhelmingly complex, is essential for literacy in Chinese. Outlier Linguistics will help you understand how the Chin... Read more.

outlier-linguistics.com

This is a newsletter for advanced students run by Andrew Methven. The free version includes a weekly newsletter with highlighted readings and some interesting vocabulary highlighted and discussed. ... Read more.

newsletter.slowchinese.net

This website allows you to look up all sorts of things related to characters, including pronunciation in historical and regional varieties, components based on their pictographic origin, and much m... Read more.

zi.tools