Chinese Learning Resources
Skritter is great for learning characters and words, but it can't teach you Chinese by itself. You'll need speaking and listening practice, too. Ideally, your life is full of Chinese-speaking people with whom you can practice. Or perhaps you are taking a Chinese class from a good teacher. If not, or if you want more practice, here are some resources that we think are useful.
ChinesePod is the best online service we've found for learning spoken Chinese, which is why we're partnered with them. The core of ChinesePod is its large lesson archive. These are dialogues with explanations of words, grammar, and culture by Shanghai-based radio hosts. ChinesePod is great for getting additional context for the language at all skill levels, and the lessons have great audio quality.
ChinesePod also offers a host of other study methods; we recommend checking them out for yourself. Some of them are quite effective, and most are reasonably priced. And with our recent partnership, you can now use Skritter's Scratchpad on ChinesePod to fill in the writing void while listening to great audio.
ChineseTeachers.com is one of the best solutions we've found for getting one-on-one Chinese lessons. They hook up independent teachers with independent students via a web-based audio platform, with an emphasis on flexibility that we think is very cool: you get to pick your teachers at any time and are only billed for the time you actually use. It's a great way to support independent teachers, and one-on-one lessons can't be beat for efficiency or motivation.
All Japanese All The Time (AJATT) is a powerful site run by Khatzumoto, who taught himself to seriously rock Japanese and is also learning Mandarin and Cantonese. The site is like a pool of motivation in which you should jump, regardless of which language you're learning.
Chinese-forums is the place we go when we want to talk about learning Chinese, what tools other people use, and how to overcome learning barriers. It's a very well run and overall motivating forum with lots of energy!
We met the founders of AhaChinese at a big language learning conference in November 2009. We were very impressed by their drive, their warmth, and of course what they are making. If you want to teach your younglings Chinese, we highly recommend their materials.
Popup Chinese is another source of audio Chinese lessons, with a couple neat tools like Adsotrans and a Firefox dictionary plugin. Good at disambiguating words in sentences when doing translations.
HSK Flashcards, run by Jake Marble, provides several good downloadable/printable word lists, as well as an online flashcard tool. Jake provided some of our word lists; thanks Jake!
What if English was written like Chinese? An essay explaining some characteristics of Chinese based on their structure, via analogy with English. Whether you know Chinese or not, this is a fascinating read.
Pīnyīn.info has a lot of information about how to use pīnyīn, some of the rules for which can actually be pretty complex.
Omniglot has a truly great collection of pages you should read through if you are new to the language and want to understand the basics. The explanations are comprehensive, the writing is accessible, and there are lots of good examples.