Online Resource For Chinese

Anonymous's picture

One neat site for Chinese learners that I've come across is www.zhongwen.com. One can look up a character by stroke, radical, pinyin or an English translation. They also have several texts that take advantage of their website's format, allowing the reader to click on characters to see their meaning and various compounds the word appears in. There's also a function that has a list (though somewhat limited) of English names translated into Chinese. All in all, a  fun site to play around on. One caveat is that the website is frame-heavy and often, if one uses the website too much, the code gets a little weird and doesn't quite work right, requiring one to just open a new page and reload the site. This makes the site not quite the reliable dictionary but it's good for a quick look up and there are many things to click on and explore.

Laurel's picture

I agree, zhongwen.com is always a good first place to look for a definition! It does seem to be one of the only online dictionaries that offers word definitions (cidian) rather than just characters (zidian). The "Decipher Chinese Characters" etymologies on the site tend towards folk etymology -- they don't take into account the phonetic components used in the majority of characters, for example. But there are so many other interesting features on the site, who can complain about a little imprecision?

Anonymous's picture
Hi, maybe you could add Chinese-Tools.com among the usefull Chinese language resources:
- Mandarin audio courses : 40 mp3 lessons
- Chinese dictionary : with audio
- Chinese tools : annotation, converter, pronunciation
And many more...