Useful Resources

Okay folks, here's some useful resources for the Chinese learner:

Online Dictionaries

Yellow Bridge - calling itself "the web's most comprehensive English-Chinese dictionary", this brilliant resource allows you to look up thousands of words in English, pinyin, simplified Chinese or traditional Chinese. The best feature of the dictionary is that it uses animated java images to show you how to write each character in either simplified or traditional Chinese.

MDBG - an excellent FREE online dictionary.

Podcasts

ChinesePod.com - one of the best Mandarin podcasts on the internet. Daily lessons in spoke Mandarin for beginners, intermediate, and advanced learners.

ChineseLearnOnline - Over 200 Chinese Mandarin podcast lessons with PDF guides from beginner to advanced level.

Online Courses

Chinese-Tools.com - a great site for beginners. It offers over 30 lessons, as well as hosting an excellent dictionary and links to many fun resources including a Chinese name generator, Chinese poems, songs, and pinyin-Chinese converters, etc.

Characters

The Most Common Chinese Characters - the name says it all really! This is a list of the 3,000 most common Chinese characters used in everyday newspapers, magazines, etc.

Grammar

Chinese Grammr - an introduction to Chinese grammar at Unilang.org.

Translators

Google Translate - a two-way translator offered by the fabulous peeps at Google.

Software

WordChamp - a great learning resource for any language, this site allows you to download a piece of software so that when you move your mouse over a Chinese character, a pop-up will give you the English translation(s) and sometimes even the audio sound of the word.