Chinese Links
This page lists some links that may be useful for students of Chinese.
China History Forum
The China History Forum (CHF) is an amazing resource devoted to the discussion of Chinese history throughout the ages. The forum is frequented by a number of experts related to various features of China's history.
The forum presents an interesting approach to ensuring quality of discussion: an entrance exam based on the Imperial Chinese Examination system. New users are allowed to post thirty times, after which the ability to post is removed until they have successfully passed a short multiple-choice exam on China's history. This ensures that ongoing memebers are sufficiently devoted to have conducted background research into the forum's topic.
DimSum Chinese Tools
The website Mandarin Tools provides a wealth of useful resources for anyone studying Chinese. In addition to the fantastic tools on the site, the author has made the majority of the tools available offline in a single Java application that runs in Windows, Linux and MacOS X.
DimSum presents an extensive dictionary with pinyin lookup, as well as the ability to search for characters by drawing them into a window. Animation to demonstrate the stroke order of characters in the dictionary is provided, and an extra download will also pronounce words. The software will annotate Chinese text pasted into the main window, with individual words being highlighted and their meanings shown. There is also the ability to convert between simplified and traditional Chinese characters. There are also numerous other features such as live website annotation and a flashcard system to aid in the learning of vocabulary.
On top of all that DimSum is absolutely free!
Chinese Vocabulary Help for "Chinese in Steps"
Introduction:
This section is for the use of anyone taking the Chinese Languages For All course at the University of York, or anyone who is using the "Chinese in Steps" series of books as part of their Chinese language course.
In the course of learning Chinese using this book, I found it useful to create a series of flashcards to help with learning the vocabulary in the book. As the program that I used to create the flashcards is open and freely available, I am making the flashcards file available here in case it will be useful for anyone else.
The program that I used to make the flashcards is a free Java-based tool called Pauker. It is available for download here: Pauker Homepage.
A vocabulary file covering the first volume of "Chinese in Steps" is available here: Chinese in Steps, Volume 1.
In order to use the vocabulary file, you will need the Arial Unicode font for your computer. This font is normally installed along with Microsoft Office, and so you will probably need that in order to view the flashcards correctly. Most people will have this installed and, unfortunately, there isn't an effective free replacement for this font. If you do not have this font available, normally noted by the flashcards displaying strange characters rather than Chinese, please contact me and I can help you work around this issue.
If you have any questions, suggestions or notice any mistakes, I can be contacted through my homepage here: Joss' homepage.
