Thursday, April 14, 2011

Studying Chinese

I came across these things today for people who are interested in studying Chinese. Quite frankly, I'm not sure how I missed them before but these should be some awesome tools when online and I think these will help to jumpstart my own degrading language skills.

The first is a Taiwanese site that prints the news in Chinese and English side by side. The LibertyTimes will now be bookmarked on my machine and I hope to be able to step through a couple of articles each week. I found out about this site from ChineseHacks which also gave me information on how to convert traditional Chinese to simplified Chinese characters (and vice versa) using a plugin (Tong Wen Tang) available via Firefox, Chrome and Safari.  He also showed another plugin from PeraPera-Kun which offers an incredible online dictionary that will help to translate Chinese characters on the web into English.

I've tried them out on my browser (FF 4.0) and am very pleased thus far. If you are serious about wanting to study Chinese online (or at least being able to brush up on it as in my case) for free, these are some pretty cool resources. Rest assured, I will have both LibertyTimes and ChineseHacks bookmarked for future reference!

(11/17/11 - I just discovered that the PeraPera-Kun website changed their domain and I have updated my link here accordingly.)

2 comments:

  1. I admire anyone who has the ability to read/speak/write Chinese. Of course it helps if you're married to a Chinese woman!! Hope all is well with you all.

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  2. Well, let it just suffice to say that it certainly doesn't hurt... ;-)

    All is good, thanks. Hopefully you are doing equally well...

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