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Add-ons
Perapera Chinese (Firefox, Chrome), an add-on that displays pop-up definitions and pronunciations (including tone marks & color coding) for Chinese characters in the web browser.
Zhongwen: A Chinese-English Popup Dictionary (extension for Google Chrome)
New Tong Wen Tang (Chrome, Firefox), and add-on which transliterates between simplified and ...
20
Websites
9610 Shufazidian, database of calligraphic variants (mostly supports Simplified Character entries and provides its traditional appearance in calligraphy)
Allset Learning Chinese Grammar Wiki, a site with over 1000 categorized grammatical structures with explanations and examples.
Baidu Tieba
BliuBliu: n + 1 word reading material with glossary (...
17
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 them to work. If you find a dead link in this list, mark it (cumulatively) with asterisks. If a link has enough ...
15
Podcasts
慢速中文 Slow Chinese, they provide audio + transcript. Audio can be listened to online or downloaded.
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 ...
15
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 ...
14
Yes. For Mandarin (Simplified Chinese):
The Contemporary Chinese Dictionary (现代汉语词典): This one is for words and phrases. They have a version in both Chinese and English.
Xinhua Dictionary (新华字典): this is for Chinese characters. Also available in both English and Chinese.
I'm not too familiar with traditional dictionaries. But 國語日報辭典 seems pretty popular ...
14
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.
Conversation Exchange
My Language Exchange
The Mixxer
italki
/r/TeachEachOther
Hinative
Lang-8
PopOn
Busuu
LingQ
Polyglot Club
13
Online Courses
Most 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.
Yoyo Chinese features short video lessons and authentic Mandarin dialogue from unscripted interviews done on the streets of China. One ...
13
Apps:
Baidu Translate (百度翻译) Similar to Google Translate, C-E/E-C translations but more. OCR (an in-app purchase in Pleco), useful common phrases/expressions list, audio lookup, save your lookups. Android/iOS.
Chinese HSK it has several HSK levels with some useful grammar and vocabulary games, great for practice. It has also dictionary and special levels (...
12
Textbooks
Colloquial Chinese 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.
Mandarin Chinese - Language of the Middle Kingdom by Johan Björkstén, is an interactive textbook that adapts ...
11
There is an American guy (I think) who teaches people how to speak Taiwanese on Youtube. He even teaches the native Taiwanese people how to speak 闽南语. You can see the videos here.
EDIT:
Looks like the playlist is dead. This is the guy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJo2OHi6hgs
9
Go to the most reliable source -- order the Maryknoll Fathers' set of 3 textbooks with CDs. While it is not exactly comprehensible input in its best form (it's predictible, since it's a book and the order doesn't change), it is the best set of materials currently available, and certainly the most comprehensive. If you have the patience to work through all ...
9
Dictionaries
Online
3000 Hanzi. Searchable with pinyin or hanzi. Chinese-English, Chinese-French, Chinese-German dictionaries. Includes translated example sentences and detailed character information (including frequency).
Almaany English-Chinese Dictionary. Free online English-Chinese and Chinese-English dictionary with words and phrases. As of February ...
8
For example, you can go to Forvo.com. (You can find the Chinese section at this address; on the right you see the top users that provided most audios.)
It's a huge database of words, characters, expressions in any language provided by users. The good thing is there's a lot of stuff, but the down-side is that although some users provided many audios (so you ...
8
Newspapers
中国日报网 — ChinaDaily.com.cn
FT中文网 - Financial Times Chinese
纽约时报中文网 - New York Times - displays articles as English-Chinese parallel text (example)
8
You can find some bookstores near the Elementary Schools (小學).
If you see some signs like 國小參考書, go to find 參考書 (references) or 評量題 (examinations) for the first or second grade (一、二年級). 參考書 include the teachings in the textbooks and some Q&A. 評量題 have only Q&A.
You should know that all of them are totally in Chinese, no English.
(Ask your ...
7
I learned Chinese through children's books as a child.
I've suffered from NOT using children's books in other languages. What has happened in those languages is that I've learned a lot of "technical" terms, and can hold my own in "advanced" discussions. Then I trip over some grammar point or some every day phrase that every 10-year old native speaker knows.
...
7
There is one main difference between children's books and adult foreign textbooks:
Adult foreign textbooks are designed to give foreigners the best chance to communicate in simple everyday circumstances.
Children's books start with the very basics and require longer to get to the same place, however they provide you a much more solid base and a far wider ...
7
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.
...
7
As a form of Southwestern Mandarin, you can approach the Chongqing dialect with resources designed for Sichuanese in general. The English Wikipedia gives a lot of resources on "Si4cuan1hua4", including a good overview of the phonology, and a introduction to Sichuanese Pinyin. The Chinese Wikipedia gives a little more detail on the Chengdu-Chongqing dialect.
...
6
Here is a nice short overview on Mandarin tone sandhis: http://web.mit.edu/jinzhang/www/pinyin/tones/index.html
If you want to read into the details I have found the following a very good source (from the father of another romanization): "Yuen Ren Chao: A Grammar of Spoken Chinese. University of California Press, Berkeley, 1968, ISBN 0-520-00219-9."
6
Complete rule of tones change is not a simple subject which can be understood just b a list. But there is a simple one I think might be suitable for you. http://www.trinity.edu/sfield/chin1501/ToneChange.html
Plus, if you are a foreigner who want learn Chinese without academic purpose, I think it's enough since many Chinese cannot use tones change complete ...
6
I agree with others who say you should work with a native speaker to help you with pronunciation. However, having a grammar book will be immensely helpful as well, since many native speakers are often unaware of their own language's grammar (many will often say "that's just how you say it" without knowing why; I've also heard native speakers assert that ...
6
As far as I know, there is one dictionary for this: 《现代汉语频率词典》，1986，北京语言学院出版社.
However, this dictionary is a little old and difficult to find. What's more, some of the readings are outdated, because 《普通话异读词审音表》 was published after the dictionary gathered the data.
The Unihan database contains the kHanyuPinlu field which is from 《现代汉语频率词典》. For example:
和:
...
5
I have read some children's books and found that they can be helpful. However, there is one drawback that I've seen, which doesn't apply to textbooks. Some children's books are designed to help children learn to read. However, the assumption is that the children already know how to speak. Thus, the book helps new readers learn characters but assumes they ...
5
Xinhua Dictionary is kind of a gold-standard for Chinese dictionaries, similar to the place Merriam-Webster holds in the English-speaking world.
5
Here are my two favorite browser-based pinyin cheat-sheets:
https://chinese.yabla.com/chinese-pinyin-chart.php
http://www.quickmandarin.com/chinesepinyintable/pinyintable_vertical.php
Whereas the site linked to in the currently top-ranked answer (lost-theory.org - a nice, new find for me, BTW) uses big, lossless .wav files (which also unfortunately seem to ...
5
When I was in Jiangsu province (and later, Shanghai), I was interested in learning Shanghainese and other Wu dialects. Unfortunately, there aren't that many resources, and a lot of the ones that do exist are low quality (No IPA, crazy made up romanizations, pronunciations indicated with characters, etc.) Here are a few things I found and my thoughts on them (...
5
I think it is a terrible mistake that the website has made, because there is no occasion when qu is pronounced tsʰu in Mandarin. Since you can actually tell the difference between u and ü, things should be easier for you now. You can just memorise that after (pinyin) j, q, x, y, ü is always written as u, and if you see u after j, q, x, y, it's always ...
5
The only online dictionary database I can find is 《新华字典》. It is a Microsoft Access database containing 20823 characters. You can run a query on the database and search for "方言" in the "xiangjie"(详解) column. There are shortcomings however, 20823 characters may not be comprehensive enough, and it usually doesn't tell you which dialect the character is used in.
...
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