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

Anki is a cool piece of Free Software for learning vocabulary words and phrases. It uses spaced repetition to help increase learning speed and memorization by repeating more often the terms you don't know and gradually decreasing those that you do.

Summary

Omniglot is an excellent resource for learners of just about any major world language. Simon Ager has put together an exceptional amount of information about the systems used to express language in the written form, complete with images, explanations and audio samples.

This article in particular brings attention to Simon's resources regarding the Abjad (consonant alphabets) used for writing in Hebrew.

From Website

Hebrew is a member of the Canaanite group of Semitic languages. It was the language of the early Jews, but from 586 BC it started to be replaced by Aramaic as the everyday language of the Jews. Since then it has continued to be used as a liturgical language and to some extent as a spoken vernacular.

Visit Omniglot.com Hebrew Alphabet, Pronunciation and Language

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.

Summary

Yolango is a new (free!) site for learning English through online videos complete with transcripts and level divisions. It provides users with loads and loads of real video content from all over the Web. Those with an account can keep track of the videos they have watched recently and mark their favorite videos. It also maintains a scoreboard for user score rankings.

Learn a Language while Listening to Music

Earworms Learning has created a unique product for learners of numerous foreign languages including French, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Mandarin Chinese, Portuguese and Spanish (Arabic coming soon). earworms mbt® Rapid Languages combines language-learning instruction with a variety of music and subtle repitition to engage students and enhance memorization. And it works!

Developed by language teaching experts and leveraging technology for accelerated learning, earworms manages to penetrate the brain in some amazing ways and anchor words and phrases deep into memory. It's the next best thing to learning in your sleep!

Summary

Omniglot is an excellent resource for learners of just about any major world language. Simon Ager has put together an exceptional amount of information about the systems used to express language in the written form, complete with images, explanations and audio samples.