Summary

The Rocket Chinese product from Rocket Languages has proved to be a highly successful, fun! and fast method for beginners to learn the Chinese language. The Rocket Languages team has designed a multi-faceted course including extensive audio lessons, software and learning games, grammar lessons with audio clips and a member's forum for help on demand.

As with any Rocket Languages product, try it out and if you don't like the results, you can get all your cash back for 60 days after you place an order. No risk there, and the potential to truly learn a new language!

From Website

Rocket Chinese is designed to be the easiest to follow system for learning how to speak Chinese available. It is an interactive course that makes you want to study. Also, it's practical. You'll discover exactly what to say in virtually all situations.

With Rocket Chinese, you are going to learn Chinese rapidly, effectively, and easily. You are going to be able to speak at a restaurant, at an airport, with new friends...

With the Rocket Languages Chinese Program you get:

A Rocket Languages Interactive Audio Course that prompts you to speak Chinese in a conversational and friendly way so that the words just stick in your mind! Learn a language the easy way!

Mega Software Learning Games that are specifically designed to increase your vocabulary and understanding of Chinese and allow you to have fun in the process!

Fully illustrated and easy-to-follow Grammar Lessons, for those of you who love to know how Chinese works. Most of these come with embedded audio clips in the lessons so that you can hear exactly how the words are pronounced!

If you have any questions, you can either email us or post a message on our Members Only Learners Forums, where our team of language experts and fellow enthusiasts will respond to your needs. With every Premium order you get unlimited and full access to our Forum - imagine having a teacher, virtually "on call" 24 hours a day!

And of course all Rocket Languages products are backed by a 60 Day 100% Money Back Guarantee. We're that confident, and it's that simple.

Rocket Languages will teach you how to speak Chinese naturally, so you can read, write, speak, and understand the language as though you have lived there all your life - these are truly cutting-edge multimedia courses!

Find out more about Rocket Chinese.

Summary

hskflashcards.com offers an amazingly easy way to prepare for the Mandarin Chinese HSK (Hànyǔ Shuǐpíng Kǎoshì; simplified Chinese: 汉语水平考试; traditional Chinese: 漢語水平考試) exam (view Wikipedia). The site provides you with free PDF downloads for all the vocabulary you'll need to pass the test! You cana also browse the vocabulary through the site itself, or create an account to study them online right through your web browser.

Additionally, the site provides printable vocabulary cards for two of the major Mandarin Chinese intructional textbooks used worldwide: the Practical Chinese Reader (PCR) and New Practical Chinese Reader (NPCR).

And it's all free! Bravo Jake, nice work indeed. :)

From Website

Welcome to HSK Flashcards. This site is intented to be a one-stop resource for HSK vocabulary lists and flashcards for people studying Mandarin Chinese. To begin studying the flashcards right now, just click the green “study” button on your left.

The entire HSK vocabulary list is available to download in several file formats, including flashcards in PDF format (suitable for printing on Avery business card paper). Recently, I added the Practical Chinese Reader textbook vocabulary lists, as well as the vocabulary lists from the New Practical Chinese Reader.

If you find errors in any of the lists, please email me. If you need the lists in another file format, please email me. If you have a suggestion for the website, please email me. If you're bored, please email me.

Mandarin Chinese is an interesting, useful language! I hope this site helps your exploration and learning!

Hànyǔ Shuǐpíng Kǎoshì: “The Chinese Proficiency Test (HSK) is China's national standardized test...to assess the Chinese language proficiency of non-native speakers”

In 2006, I tried to find a list of the HSK vocabulary so that I could make myself some flashcards. I did find a couple of lists, but they were all incomplete in one way or another, so I merged several of those lists to get something better. The results of that work are available on this site. Many people have contributed since then by sending in the typos, errors and missing words they have found in the lists. Topple recently reviewed all of the words in all four lists, and found several deficiencies. Thanks, Topple!

New Practical Chinese Reader: “NPCR is a new series of textbooks designed for native English speakers to learn Chinese. ... The objective of this series is to develop the student's ability to communicate using Chinese through the study of language structure, language function, and related cultural knowledge along with the training of listening, speaking, reading and writing skills.”

In 2007, I found the Practical Chinese Reader textbook series, and started using that curriculum to better formalize my study. Matti Tukiainen has the vocabulary lists for books 1, 2 and 3 on his website. I've added those lists to this site. The PCR books have been rewritten in a second edition, called the New Practical Chinese Reader. I have digitized NPCR books 1, 2 and 3. Topple recently offered his help by digitizing NPCR books 4 and 5 (well, book 5 will be here soon).

— Jake Marble, 马杰克

Visit hskflashcards.com

Summary

Semanda offers quick and simple review and download of Mandarin Chinese vocabulary cards and online multiple choice quizzes for children/kids! These are all free. :)

Be sure to have a look at the printable PDFs of the vocabulary packs.

From Website

Free Mandarin Chinese Flash Cards

Semanda.com is a website for learning basic Mandarin Chinese vocabulary using illustrated flashcards. Online flashcards and multiple choice quizzes in several subjects are available, as well as printable PDF flash cards.

On semanda.com, you will find basic Mandarin Chinese flashcards and vocabulary exercises for children and beginners.

The flashcards use both simplified Chinese characters (hanzi) and pinyin, and are available both online and as printable PDF files.

The wordlists cover a wide range of basic concepts, such as colors, animals, fruits, vegetables, vehicles, furniture etc. New flash cards are added all the time, so please check back regularly for updates!

Visit Semanda.com

Summary

TheChineseReader is an very useful website for people learning to read Mandarin Chinese. You can paste in any text in Mandarin and the website will use a large variety of tools (see Resources & Credits below) to transform the text into clickable annotations.

This is wonderful for anyone having difficulty with a Chinese text and wanting that extra bit of help. It could also give some idea to people who know no Mandarin (or read no Mandarin) and are attempting to understand a website written in Chinese characters.

Excellent tool - many thanks Adam!

From Website

About the Reader

This project came about in response to the continually increasing number of english-speakers learning chinese. After many years studying chinese myself, and seeing friends do likewise, there were a number of tedious functions I came to feel a computer was better suited to do. Some hair-pulling web-development later, the TheChineseReader™ (TCR) was born.

The feautures of this site are constantly under development, though the speed of that development may not be all too impressive. If you have suggestions for fixes, new features, or other general feedback & inquiries, please contact feedback@thechinesereader.com

TCR is not a commercial site per se, though we are supported by sponsored advertisements, which help cover the costs of hosting, development, and maintenance. Thanks for understanding.

About the Creator

My name is Adam. I am a recent graduate of UPenn, now living in San Francisco. I work for a Management Consultancy, which leaves not that much time to work on this site. =) But I'll try to keep it up to date and add features when time permits.

Resources & Credits

The reader would not function very well without the unsung contributions of all those behind the technologies and data-resources used in this site—particularly those in the open-source community. I would like to take a moment to acknowledge them:

Unihan Database: this database provides the foundation for all of the single character entries and cantonese functionality. It is being used here under the GNU license, and is available at the Unicode website.

CeDict Database: this database proides the data behind all multi-character lookups. An incredible amount of work has gone into this project, and I applaud the people who make it possible. It is being used here under the GNU license, and is available at the Cedict website.

Ruby On Rails: the entire site is coded in the Ruby On Rails (RoR) framework. RoR is a web-application development paradigm that is 100% open-source, and in this developers opinion, the best in class. Again, profuse thanks to those who enable this and so many other sites to be realized through their efforts.

MySQL: alongside the RoR, this site is powered by a MySQL database. MySQL is arguably the most powerful open-source relational-DB package in the world. And it has contributed more than its fair share to web-apps everywhere.

Wenlin Software: Wenlin (文林) is a piece of commerical software whose aid to chinese-learners is almost unquantifiable. I include it in the credits here because thier mouse-over dictionary lookup is the rightful inspiration for the reader's core functionality.

Visit TheChineseReader.com

Summary

Chinese-Course.com is a fast-loading, useful site for Mandarin Chinese learners to manage and practice vocabulary lists (words and sentences). There are many existing word and sentence lists created by other users that you can snag and use right away. You can also create your own lists and sentences on-the-fly and test yourself until you know them all. As a result, this resource works for Mandarin Chinese students of all levels, beginner to advanced. The self-testing is done via built-in flashcard software that you control.

The website has an integrated dictionary that gives explanations of individual charaters and terms (two or more Chinese characters that go together to create a concept or word) and includes examples of how these are used in real sentences. In addition, when you view a sentence, you can scroll over the charaters and view annotations. NB: You can copy and past any Chinese text you want into the site's Text Analyzer and it provides you with what you see below (see grey scroll-over pop-up in image for annotation).

Something I have found incredibly useful is the Sentence of the Day email that you can subscribe to on the site. This sends a different sentence every day and shows the Traditional and Simplified versions, complete with a translation of the sentence.

If you upgrade to a premuim membership (~$5/month) you can also hear audio for the sentence. In fact, the only thing you cannot do without a membership is hear the audio on the site. Other than that, it is full-featured and incredibly quick and helpful for learning Chinese through memorizing words/sentences and their constituents.

Today's Sentence of the Day caught my attention, and reminded me to post about this cool tool for Chinese learners!

Bravo Oliver for this excellent site and keep up the great work!

From Website

Study Chinese from Home

Welcome to the website of Chinese-Course.com. Here you can learn Traditional and Simplified Chinese online with our effective Flashcard System.

Improve your Chinese with only 10 minutes a day!

• Multiple Choice exercises and an innovative flashcard system will improve your Chinese in a relatively short time
• New words, idioms and phrases are added slow or fast to your personal vocabulary list, depending on how fast you learn
• You can listen to words and sentences with high quality sound files. Over 10.000 recorded words from Native speakers of Taiwan.
• Suitable for all levels - beginner, intermediate and advanced Mandarin Chinese learner
• Learn how to write with the integrated stroke order tool
• Words are explained in English, German and Spanish. Pronunciation is shown in Pinyin and Bopomofo (Zhuyin)
• Learn Chinese with funny jokes, famous quotes and romantic poems
• Learn traditional and simplified characters at the same time

Visit Chinese-Course.com

Summary

ChinesePod has created a sweet resource for anyone learning Chinese and interested in the 2008 Olympics in Beijing.

On the site you'll find an interactive map of Beijing with all the venues, loads of free lessons regarding sports and the Olympics, a world map with participating countries that has audio of how to say those countries in Chinese, etc.

If you are interested in learning Mandarin Chinese, ChinesePod will get you up and running quickly. It's loads of fun, too, if you're into learning on the fly and connecting with other learners.

From Website

The 2008 Summer Games are almost upon us, and to commemorate this monumental sporting event we've launched ChinesePod Olympics, a mini-site filled with information you'll need to follow the Games and navigate Beijing. Whether you're going to see the Olympics yourself, or just really want to bone up on your field hockey vocabulary, this is the site for you.

On our fully interactive map, you can locate each of the Olympic venues and their respective events. English, Chinese, pinyin, and audio recordings are all there to assist in you getting around the Olympic Village.

Visit ChinesePod Olympics.

Summary

It's difficult to "summarize" the booming expansion that has occurred with the Kaufmann crew since "The Linguist" appeared on Free Language a year ago. That is why Free Language has numerous articles on the various websites and resources available through multilinguist Steve Kaufmann's web entelechy, including the many LinqQ [liŋk] podcasts, the LingQ method, revisiting The Linguist on Language and why not throw in a little thelinguist.com love, too. :)

This particular podcast is ChineseLingQ, a roughly weekly podcast with mp3 audio content for Chinese language learners. Transcripts of the podcasts are available through LingQ.

From Website

What is ChineseLingQ?

First of all, the name itself (which is pronounced Chinese Link) needs a little explaining. The first part, “Chinese”, is fairly obvious since we teach Chinese. LingQ is the name of our online learning system which you can find at LingQ.com. At LingQ you’ll study many different languages in a fun, community atmosphere. The “Ling” in LingQ comes from TheLinguist.com the people behind LingQ. Lastly, the “Q” is important because it forms the speech bubble in our logo and throughout our site and because it makes “lingq” sound like “link” (we think!) which is what our system does for you.

At ChineseLingQ...

. we LingQ you to a world of real Chinese content
. we LingQ you to our revolutionary learning tools
. we LingQ you to a community of fellow Chinese learners

Our podcasts may contain interviews, articles, or audiobook excerpts but are most often just general conversations in Chinese. We will usually talk about topics of general interest. Please do send us feedback and topic requests. We’re always happy to hear from you.

After you listen to the podcast, sign up for a free account at LingQ (l-i-n-g-q.com) and study the full transcript using LingQ's revolutionary learning tools.

At LingQ, you may also want to submit writing for correction or join live 1 on 1 and group discussions with our tutors. Plus you will find thousands more podcasts with transcript. Come and find out what LingQ is all about!

Of course, even if you don’t decide to become a member, you can continue listening to the podcasts as long as you like.

Visit ChineseLingQ.com

Subscribe

Subscribe to ChineseLingQ Podcast.
Subscribe to ChineseLingQ Podcast via iTunes.

LingQ Podcast Network

ChineseLingQ
EnglishLingQ
FrenchLingQ
GermanLingQ
ItalianLingQ
JapaneseLingQ
PortugueseLingQ
RussianLingQ
SpanishLingQ
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