Learn Chinese Language Online. Pinyin, Character Flashcards, Simplified and Traditional characters, character stroke order, language games, dictionary, transcription and pronunciation.

Our mission

This is a free site for all those interested in learning the chinese language (mandarin chinese)

Sometime ago I decided that I wanted to learn this language. A great part of the effort of learning mandarin chinese comes from the need of memorizing countless of chinese characteres, and trying to retain their pronunication - which generally speaking cannot be derived from the visual appearance of the characters. So - just like most people - I made myself a zillion flashcards and carried them everywhere, using every available bit of time to practice and test myself. As time went by, though, I saw that I wasn't able to remember some characteres, or that I was beginning to forget others. I needed a system for tracking my progress and for checking which words were being the most difficult.

Years ago I would have written a desktop application, but I decided that if I wrote a web application instead, other people that might be in my same situation might benefit. Also, this approach would allow me to work with internationalization issues of web applications that use CJK characters

The result is this site - completely free

What can I do here?

• You can check our extensive chinese dictionary
  
  
• You can see the phonetic of each word or phrase, written in most of the phonetic systems - from the popular Hanyu Pinyin to the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) and of course the ZhuYin (Bopomofo) notation, the Wade-Giles system,e tc...
  
  
• You can see the relationships that exist between different words and characteres
  
  
• You can see, for each word or expression, short stories or tales that people use to memorize it. You can add your own stories too.
  
  
• You can see examples of usage for many of the words and expressions
  
  
• You can see animated sequences illustrating the stroke order for many characters
  
  
• You can define and run tests for testing your knowledge. The tests are very configurable - you can choose the number of words, their difficulty, whether to include only new words or old ones too, whether to use traditional or simplified characters, etc..
  
  
• You can see your progress by means of our statistics - you can see how many mistakes you have been making, which are the words or expressions that are most difficult for you, the number of errors that you've been making, the number of words that you know, etc...
  
  
• You can define your own "decks" or "groups" of words, and include them in tests for practicing. For example, you could define a "deck" of flashcards called "colours", or "common objects", or "verbs", and then configure a test to use it. You can define as many decks as you wish, and using our statistics you can see which are the most problematic decks for you.
  
  
• ... and many more things that we will be adding, like games, grammar,links, etc...
  
  

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