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Organization

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Note: new rules could be added in the future.


Alphabetical Index

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11 Answers

Add-ons

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Podcasts

  • 慢速中文 Slow Chinese, they provide audio + transcript. Audio can be listened to online or downloaded.
  • 悦读.FM (Happy Reading FM), they provide reading records of selective articles with subtitle.
  • 每日视频新闻, daily Chinese language news podcast found on iTunes.
  • Popup Chinese An irreverent and cool take on learning colloquial Mandarin, as well as general Mainland culture and norms.
  • Chinese Pod This is another nice podcast that provides an easy way to learn colloquial Mandarin.
  • Melnyks This podcast has a lot of content, but you may find having to rewind often due to their content size, speed, and style of teaching.
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Language Exchanges

Various websites to find language exchange partners, people will meet in person or talk online and help each other learn each others' respective languages.

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Books

  • Chinese Breeze Graded Reader Series (Péking University Press)

    Many books, many short stories for all levels of Chinese. It's clearly indicated how many words in each book and the level you need to read it. Relatively interesting stories with lots of repetitions to make you practice each word. Definitely worth a try - for beginner to advanced level.

  • Graded Chinese Reader (2 books) (Sinolingua)

    Selected Abridged Chinese Contemporary Short Stories. Contains about 2000 Chinese words based on level A and B listed in the HSK. Interesting stories about today's China and not too hard to read when you have a beginner to intermediate level.

  • Yong Ho. Beginner's Chinese (Hippocrene Books)

    A great beginner's Chinese book which not only have Chinese grammatical structure and words but also have sections dedicated within each chapter specifically addressing Cultural insights that can help the learner understand some nuances that may not be otherwise apparent. The Dec 1997 publication of this book is plagued with errors in pinyin however these errors were later rectified in the Oct 2010 Book.

  • Yong Ho. Intermediate Chinese (Hippocrene Books)

    Published almost a decade after Beginner's Chinese, this book acts as a vocabulary and grammatical supplementary to help take your Chinese to the next level. The only disappointing thing about this book is that there is not nearly as many cultural insights to help you along, however lots of new grammar structures are introduced and it is a perfect transition after having read the first book.

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Textbooks

  • Colloquial Chinese (1 and 2) by Kan Qian, Routledge: Both books offer dialogues, exercises, texts, grammar highlights, cultural highlights and audio CDs. The first book is for beginners, the second one is intermediate. They are good for self-study.

  • Practical Chinese Reader Beijing Language & Culture University Press

  • New Practical Chinese Reader
  • 新思路 (Business Chinese) series
  • 汉语教程 (Hanyu Jiao Cheng) series, Beijing Language & Culture University Press
  • 汉语听力教程 (Hanyu Tingli Jiao Cheng) listening comprehension series, Beijing Language & Culture University Press
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Software

Free software - The user can make/add their own material to the software

  • Anki 2 (PC, Mac, Linux, Android, iOS), a SRS program for learning. The version 2 comes with new additions. Chinese Flash card decks need to be downloaded or entered by the user.

  • Flashonary (iOS) Flashcard dictionary. Custom flashcards can be created for words based on dictionary entries and studied using an SRS study system (new/unknown words shown more often, known words shown less often). Has audio pronunciations (paid add-on). Can share made flashcards.

  • Ibus Input bus for Unix / Linux. Depending on your distribution you may have this installed by default. If you do not have Ibus installed, first install Chinese support from language settings, and then install ibus and ibus-pinyin using your package manager.

  • Mnemosyne SRS program for learning. Chinese Flash card decks need to be downloaded.

Commercial software - Chinese is Integrated into the software

  • Berlitz
  • Hanping Chinese Dictionary Pro (embermitre): Exclusively Android App. Dictionary/Learning application for Chinese.
  • HanWangJian softwares (focusing on Pinyin Input and Chinese learning).
  • Pimsleur
  • Pleco (iOS/Android) Flashcard/dictionary. Perhaps the most comprehensive dictionary/flashcard learning software available. A lot of different dictionaries available. Lots of customization available. It can even do OCR of characters using your phone's built-in camera.
  • Rosetta Stone
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I'd recommend HanWangJian, it's a set of softwares focusing on Pinyin Input and Chinese learning. (You have to pay for it.) I'm now using its Pinyin Input Method, friendly to both native speakers and learners. – Mike Manilone Dec 15 '12 at 10:02
@MikeManilone I've just added this reference in the Paying Software category. thx. – Stephane Rolland Dec 15 '12 at 14:01

Websites

  • 3000 Hanzi, a site dedicated to helping people learn to read Chinese (free and subscription).
  • Allset Learning Chinese Grammar Wiki, a site with over 1000 categorized grammatical structures with explanations and examples.
  • Baidu Tieba
  • Chinese forum on WordReference.com, an active forum for discussing anything about the Chinese language.
  • chinesestoriesplatform.com, a site with many lower intermediate & intermediate practice texts
  • Chinese Tutor, a site that works like flashcards to help memorize the Pinyin for Chinese words/phrases.
  • edu.tw, a site that provides stroke order for traditional Chinese characters (Taiwan order)
  • edu.tw, a site that explains (in Chinese) the usage of Chinese punctuation.
  • FluentU, a site that provides short Chinese videos with subtitles with characters, pinyin and English.
  • Lingomi, a site for helping Chinese learners master pinyin and tones (free).
  • learnchineseez.com, a site that provides the stroke order for Chinese characters (Mainland China order)
  • pin1yin1.com, a site that adds pinyin or Zhuyin to a text with English to help you understand a text.
  • Skritter, a site for learning to write and study Chinese (or Japanese) characters.
  • Täglich Chinesisch, explains the 2,000 most important (traditional) Chinese characters and their components through keywords and mnemonics (only in German).
  • Tianya BBS
  • Zhihu: China's quora.
  • zhongwen.com/中文.com, a resource for understanding the components (i.e. radicals) of Chinese characters.
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Television

  • Mandarin News Australia. SBS' Weekly Mandarin language news programme. Full episodes available online. English Subtitles. ≈30min per episode. Also hosts full episodes of CCTV news.

Streams

Please only post streams you have verified work. If you find a dead link in this list, mark it (cumulatively) with asterisks. If a link has enough asterisks remove it I guess. Don't remove it just because it failed once, sometimes they are down temporarily.

The links may not work if your browser is not configured to launch a media player for MMS links. You can use an external player such as VLC to play these streams.

  • CCTV 4 (mms://8.3.230.132/cctv-4/cctvNews01.wmv)
  • NJTV 1 - Nanjing TV (mms://218.94.122.203/njtvxw)
  • XZTV1* (mms://218.3.205.21/xwzhpd)
  • XZTV2* (mms://218.3.205.21/jjshpd)
  • XZTV3* (mms://218.3.205.21/shzfpd)
  • NYTV - Nanyang TV (mms://61.136.113.41/nytv_1)
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Online Courses

All of these course also have free podcasts on iTunes, if you want to try them out.

  • Popup Chinese An irreverent and cool take on learning colloquial Mandarin, as well as general Mainland culture and norms.
  • Chinese Pod This is another nice podcast that provides an easy way to learn colloquial Mandarin.
  • Melnyks This podcast has a lot of content, but you may find having to rewind often due to their content size, speed, and style of teaching.
  • Memrise.com, a Space Repeating Learning System. It provides a two steps learning. Graphical - Meaning, then Graphical - Pronunciation, then later it mixes the two. It adapts to your learning.
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Dictionaries

(Online)

  • Han Dian (in Chinese)

    The most complete dictionary ever available on Internet.

  • Dict.cn

  • MDBG English-Chinese

  • nciku

  • Wikipedia

    Wikipedia can actually be used as a dictionary, especially of proper names, historical events, modern culture, etc. Simply go to the English language page on the topic you are interested in and click on the left-hand-side link to Chinese (中文) Wikipedia (if available). You will be taken to the Chinese page on the same topic.

  • Google Images

    Google Images can be used as a visual dictionary, this is especially helpful with nouns which are not easily expressed with words, such as types of food.

  • Wiktionary
    You can search in Pinyin and Hanzi.

  • 小马词典 Xiaoma Cidian
    Has Hanzi, Pinyin and english lookup.

  • WordBuddy.com
    A drilldown dictionary for exploring characters where you can save and quiz your own word lists.

  • Youdao web version. See below for offline version.

  • 3000 Hanzi Search using pinyin and hanzi. Chinese-English, Chinese-French, Chinese-German dictionaries. Includes translated example sentences and detailed character information (including frequency).


(Offline)

  • CC-CEDICT for GoldenDict/Stardict and OS X Dictionary
    Recommended for use with GoldenDict on Windows/Linux/Android, or with Mac OS X's built-in Dictionary.

  • Flashonary
    Chinese-English and Chinese-German dictionary. Flashcards can be made from dictionary entries. For iOS (iPhone, iPod, iPad).

  • Hanping Chinese Dictionary Pro for Android. Commercial.

  • Youdao: It has various versions for Android, iPhone, Desktop Mac, iPad, Android Pad, Windows Phone. See above for the online version.

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Youdao looks neat, anyway to get it to display pinyin? – Ciaocibai Feb 17 '12 at 3:57
@Ciaocibai I'm trying to understand it! :D I also wonder why the chinese audios don't work. Do they work on your computer? – Alenanno Feb 17 '12 at 13:19
I didn't add description to Dict.cn, but it is very like youdao and it's also nice and neat. – shuangwhywhy Mar 3 at 16:35
@shuangwhywhy I fixed the links and descriptions. Thanks for the help. :) – Alenanno Mar 3 at 16:39
@Alenanno Oh I see, I mixed the online desktop version and the web version. Yes, you got it! – shuangwhywhy Mar 3 at 16:44

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