Chinese Resources

Pronounciation

  • Pinyin Chart
    • My penpal from Brazil shared it with me.
    • I think it is a good resource for starters to get used to the pronounciation of the language, especially because it includes all the tones.

Vocabulary

  • Essential Chinese for English Speakers Anki Deck
    • A recommendation by a friend who learned Chinese extensively (then quitted recently to focus on Japanese)
    • According to him, expanding vocab by learning the Pinyin & pronounciation first paired with English meanings would be helpful in expanding things you can say and keep up the motivation. It also provides the characters for those of you who still want to be literate.
    • Have fun (?)
    • I learned English vocab, chemistry and econ definitions with anki (an open source software) for a while in high school, and I can confirm it might be useful. You can choose to memorize pronounciation and its definition, but of course you can always memorize the characters included in it too. It even has visuals and pronounciations that are not always produced by robots (so, more close to how I would pronounce them). (you can download anki here)
  • This website consists of a lot of Chinese textbooks free to download. They follow a similar format as the ones I used in primary school. The original intention is for the weekend schools for Chinese descendents to learn the language, and thus there is very limited English text on the book. Not sure if that’s the best part about them, but I think it might be helpful, especially for beginners. (found it with an AidData project)

–To be updated–

Media

From my very limited expeirence of learning English, using the language to do things that are interesting and learning about the context is very helpful to keep up the motivation. After all it is a language not a formula, so we should enjoy our lives with the skill. I am on the consumer side of the information I listed below, and I receive no profits if you read them or not, so it’s truly just a suggestion.

And yes, 80% of the English sources are things I encountered by recommendation of Professor Hill in his China Debate seminar.

  • 长毛象 m.cmx.im , 活吧 alive.bar
    • Mastodon Instance with mostly simplified Chinese.
    • What is mastodon?
    • Since all social media available in mainland China now would require a Chinese phone number to register, you might be interested in the alternative platforms…
  • 知乎, while you cannot register without a phone number, if you google random things in Chinese and add site:.zhihu.com, sometimes it can generate interesting results.
  • 豆瓣, Chinese version of goodreads + imdb + reddit + etc. If you are curious about Chinese films/literature (or Chinese’ reactions to any films) you can use site:.douban.com
  • Youtube Channel(s)
    • 美食作家王刚 This one (with English Sub) shows how to shred potatoes. His channel has always been my guilty pleasure… Very useless, but that’s because I’m not good enough to learn how to cook properly.
  • News Sources (to be updated)
    • BBC/NYTimes/Washington Post Chinese Version
    • 端传媒 (they do offer student discount and you can switch to simplified Chinese version)
    • 方可成新闻实验室
    • 爱思想: Selected works from scholars in the thinktank.
  • English Sources
  • The China Project previously SupChina. It offers a very interesting angle… “The China Project is a New York-based, China-focused news, information, and business services platform. We inform and connect a global audience regarding the business, technology, politics, culture, and society of China.” – from their own website.
    • Reading the China Dream: A translation project of Chinese scholars works to English (you can also find the links to the original texts on the website)
    • China AI Newsletter: if you are interested in the topic… it’s also a translation project and you can also find the original texts.
    • What’s on Weibo, for context weibo is Chinese version of twitter
    • Six Tones: while it is a state-funded media, the coverage is very interesting.
    • China File: ChinaFile is a project of the Center on U.S.-China Relations at Asia Society. This includes translation of selected articles from Caixin Media 财新社 which is a Chinese private news agency reporting on finance in China.
    • Neican.org “Newsletter on current events in China, with many translated materials. Some items in the newsletter are available for free.” (quoted from Professor Hill)
    • Chinosity An English website about Chinese culture.

results matching ""

    No results matching ""