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How to learn Chinese guide

1on1 Mandarin — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 11:23:21 +0000

Free Chinese language study guide available for download in pdf format. (please register first in Member’s area in order to download the Study Guide.) This useful guide covers topics such as learning strategies, learning styles, maintaining motivation, overcoming barriers, memorizing vocabulary, and other issues in the study of Mandarin. Now freely available online with hard copies available at our Beijing Chinese language school. Tell all your friends!

Skritter review – a great way of learning how to write Chinese characters

Darren — Wed, 25 May 2011 08:58:10 +0000

Learning how to write Chinese characters is hard, and we can use all the help we can get. Skritter (http://www.skritter.cn) is a website that uses some clever web coding to create a novel way of helping you learn characters.

The strongest feature of Skritter in my opinion is its tool for Chinese character writing with real time feedback. This is unique as far as I am aware. When you draw a character the strokes you have drawn ‘fall’ into the right place – so every time you make a stroke a little too short, or forget the hook, or make it too straight – it will show you immediately what it should look like, and then let you continue on with writing the other strokes. Similarly, it will let you know if the stroke is in the wrong order, or wrong direction. It will even give you a hint if you are completely stuck as to which stroke comes next. Using Skritter has taught me that I have been writing the liang of piao liang (漂亮 – beautiful) wrong for months. I had been putting 儿 for the last two strokes instead of 几, and skritter would not let me get away with it!

Skritter is full of other useful features that should aid the language learner such as an inbuilt Spaced Repetition System, Audio reinforcement, and character decompositions, and user created mnenomics (see http://www.skritter.cn/pricing for a full list). Alongside which the studying is very customizable, allowing you to focus on exactly what you need whether that is just writing, or if reading and remembering the correct tone are also important to you.

However, to be honest, I am not going to be using it beyond the free trial. Partly that is due to the monthly fee ($10), but also I have already been learning for a while and I have found a set of other resources that provide almost all the features that Skritter provides.

But if you are new to learning to write Chinese characters, then it could be an excellent place for you to start. Skritter is not free, but they do let you have a two week free trial to experiment to see if it works for you. Hope this Skritter review helpful for those who want to give it try.

Random Posts

a great Chinese video player

Darren — Thu, 06 Jan 2011 10:21:27 +0000

As I mentioned in previous post, today I’d like to share more about the Chinese video player-Splayer, it’s neat, safe and really high performance. It has many great features, however, the one feature I like most is that it automatically match and download subtitles from shooter.cn, so you don’t need to find the subtitle yourself. If it sounds like something you may like it, please check it out.

here is the video player site in English: http://splayer.org/index.en.html

Zhongwen: A Chinese Pop Up Translator for Chrome

Duncan — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 11:48:30 +0000

Here’s another one for all you Chinese-learning Google Chrome users out there- this follows suit after our previous post about the Perapera-kun Chinese translator plugin for Firefox. Likewise, Zhongwen is a Google Chrome extension that brings up pop-up translations of Chinese characters and words from webpages that you are browsing.

The Zhongwen plugin translates both traditional and simplified Chinese characters into English, and uses the popular CEDICT Chinese English dictionary to do so. Most importantly, it also shows the Hanyu Pinyin along both the simplified and traditional characters.

Installing the Zhongwen plugin is quite a bit easier than the Perapera-kun plugin. All you need to do is navigate to the Zhongwen plugin page and click install; no separate dictionary file installation is required. Activating the plugin for use just requires you to click the plugin button in your browser, and mousing over Chinese characters will automatically call the translation popup to show.

To get started with the Zhongwen Extension:

1. Get the Google Chrome browser

2. Install the Zhongwen Extension

Happy surfing!

功夫梦 – The Karate Kid Streaming Online

Duncan — Thu, 12 Aug 2010 08:34:43 +0000

For those who have yet to watch the latest 2010 remake of the 1984 “The Karate Kid”, you can stream it for free through QiYi.com (奇艺 qi2yi4); though I feel that the movie title should be changed to “The Kung Fu Kid”, since the Chinese title of the movie is 功夫梦 (gong1fu meng4 – aka: dreaming of Kung Fu), and the martial art in the movie is no longer the Japanese Karate, but the Chinese Kung Fu- but that’s just me =)

I hadn’t heard of QiYi before, so I did a bit of research, and I found out that the difference between qiyi.com and other mainland online streaming video services, such as tudou.com and youku.com, is that QiYi aims to gather all of its video content through legal means through several copyright intermediary sources. This also allows QiYi to obtain higher quality and resolution videos, which is pretty nice if you’re wanting to project a movie on a screen to watch with friends.

Here’s the direct link to The Karate Kid on QiYi.com
(http://www.qiyi.com/dianying/20100725/n26619.html)

By the way, if you are those who would like to learn Chinese by watching movies, I’d recommend a product launched recently, it’s great option for those who wanted to learn Chinese in a casual and fun way.

Perapera-kun: A Chinese Pop Up Translator for Firefox

Duncan — Tue, 03 Aug 2010 07:09:55 +0000

I wanted to highlight an awesome translator pop-up tool for those who use the Firefox internet browser, called Perapera-kun. Perapera-kun is an extension add-on for Firefox that acts as a pop-up translator for Chinese, Korean, and Japanese, into English or German. I haven’t tried out the Korean, Japanese, or German dictionaries, but the Chinese-to-English dictionary provides translated meanings of words, and also the pinyin pronunciation of the word. This is a great tool to have if you’re wanting to venture into the Chinese net-space to browse some local BBS forums or news sites.

To get started with Perapera-kun:

1. Get the Firefox browser

2. Install the Perapera-kun add-on

3. Install the Chinese-to-English dictionary file

(Note: The Perapera-kun website is hosted on a WordPress site, which is blocked by the Chinese firewall. Here is a direct link to the Chinese-to-English dictionary file)

Happy surfing!

A high-quality Chinese video website

1on1 Mandarin — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 11:22:19 +0000

Today, we are introducing to you a high-quality Chinese video site: 奇艺(qí yì). It’s like Hulu.com in China. Their video quality is quite good, and stands out from other video sites in China. What’s more, they have many legal copies and full length movies, TV dramas and documentary films you can watch online for free. Please check it out at Qiyi video – www.qiyi.com.

We have a post about other Chinese video websites here, covering Youku.com, 56.com and Ku6.com. Among those four video sites, we would recommend Youku.com and Qiyi.com (they’re just like the Chinese version of Youtube and Hulu).

Mostly importantly, you can get access to tons of video resources to help you practice your Chinese listening and speaking. Hope this post is helpful and let us know if you find anything interesting.

Learn Chinese Blog | Learn to speak Chinese » Resources

How to learn Chinese guide

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Skritter review – a great way of learning how to write Chinese characters

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a great Chinese video player

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Zhongwen: A Chinese Pop Up Translator for Chrome

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功夫梦 – The Karate Kid Streaming Online

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Perapera-kun: A Chinese Pop Up Translator for Firefox

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A high-quality Chinese video website

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