Study Chinese Online From China

Online Chinese Dictionary - taking the pain of old away

MDBG Online Chinese Dictionary

http://www.xuezhongwen.net/chindict/chindict.php

Try the site dictionary right now! Enter your word into the search field below.

Chinesepod Podcast on using a Chinese dictionary

For some good old fashioned lookup of a word by radical and stroke count, practice online. Here’s a simple example:

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BE ONE WITH THE ‘Bi Hua’ 笔画 - where’s the 好 in life?

1. Which 部首 bu4 shou 3 is it? Does the woman or the baby come first?
Lookup the first radical
2. It was mom, three strokes. Now add the kid, that’s plus ….?
Add the stroke count for the complete character
3. Yes that was ’san’ bi hua.
Find definition
很好！

Writing Chinese online, should you do it?

There are a few schools of thought on the topic of writing in Chinese. Let’s first start off by separating out print handwriting, cursive handwriting, typing and composition. Why is it so important to separate out these aspects of writing? It’s because for Chinese each of these skills can require quite a bit of effort to learn on it’s own, so lumping them all together under a big topic like writing can only lead to frustration and the common phrase “It’s impossible to learn how to write in Chinese.”

In fact, if one clearly defines one’s goals for the Chinese language it is quite easy to incrementally learn each of these skills and maybe one day even be able to fit them all into a phrase like “Learning to write in Chinese wasn’t too hard.”

• print handwriting, this is what is usually taught in an academic program or by Chinese teachers. Take a pen or pencil and trace/copy that character onto a piece of paper. Do this 10 x. Do this until your hands hurt. There is value to this activity when you first start learning, but the method clearly degrades in usefullness when looked to as a memorization aide. The characters you write here are ’standard’ print-type of style. It is slow to write and few adults continue to write Chinese in this way. Why? Because it’s too slow.
• cursive handwriting, this is what most native Chinese eventually gravitate to in their handwriting. It’s that flowing scribble that doesn’t look anything like the print that teachers made you write ad infinitum. It’s the only way to really write quickly enough so that the writing flows as quickly as your thoughts. You’ll have to find a patient friend or calligraphy teacher to teach you the basic principles of the flowing strokes so that you can intuitively convert and convert properly a square-print style character into a cursive script.
• typing, this is the act of using some tool to generate characters. Usually it involves pinyin and a pick-list of characters. SMS, IM, mobile phones, typing online all use this method.
• composition, this refers to the act of taking Chinese text and reviewing it for proper grammar, style, typos, etc.

Write Chinese online from anywhere and on any computer!

One of the first challenges to writing Chinese online might be the simple fact that your computer is not configured to write in Chinese hanzi characters. This is not a tough hurdle to overcome, but sometimes it’s easiest to start with the easiest!

Here is an online resource that allows you to type pinyin, get a pick-list of hanzi characters, which are then displayed. After you’ve got all the hanzi displayed it’s as simple as copy-and-paste to that email, instant message or document that you’d like to have in hanzi, Chinese characters.

• Try it out, type in a simple ‘ni hao’ and get 你好！

Online Chinese Generator Tool: Write Chinese Hanzi from any Keyboard

http://www.mdbg.net/chindict/webime2.php?ime=mand_simp

Lexis. Is that a car or something to do with language?

What is lexis? This is something relatively new in the field of language learning. Old school teaching of languages used to focus on phrases, substitution drills and grammar. It was believed that language consisted of a ‘grammar’ and that for one to learn the language it was necessary to learn the grammar.

Problem is, when has any first-language learner of a language explicitly learned grammar? Grammar is an academic construct, a way to analyse a language. There are rules in a language, there is a right and a wrong way to say things, but does that mean we need to learn grammar?

This is where the concept of lexis came about. There are bits of language that do go together, call them lexis. It’s what tells us that we should say ‘go to school’ rather than ‘go towards school’. Gramatically they are both correct, but meaning wise, it’s the first bit that we want.

The radical re-think of what makes up the building blocks of language means that we can also take the approach to study of language in a new way. It’s actually rather easy to learn ‘lexis’ chunks. They seem to flow rhymically and easily out of one’s mouth. They make sense. They are memorable.

It is the way to go.

(We specifically will tackle how to find the proper lexis for studying Chinese online. There are lots of Chinese language materials out there but it is easy to get distracted or use materials and tools that eventually are not the best use of your time and efforts to learn to speak, read and write in Chinese Mandarin)