Repository to share resources and tips that can help when learning Chinese.
If you have suggestions please feel free to submit an issue or a pull request :)
- Flashcards
- Zhongwen (Browser extension)
- Video Resources
- Text Resources
- Audio Resources
- Calligraphy & Writing
- Dictionaries
- Translators
- Multimedia players
- Communities, Language Buddies & Finding Teachers
- Input Method (IME)
- Miscellaneous
- Resource guides
Anki is the default app for flashcards on android and windows.
Here are some decks worth noting:
- "Best Anki Deck for HSK I've come across": The deck that I use extensively. It is extremely good and accompanied me throughout my entire learning journey.
- Chinese Radicals: Very good to have a grasp of all the radicals in order to understand better the Chinese characters.
- Chinese Grammar Study Set: Not a huge fan of it. I didn't use it much; however, I can understand why people can like it.
- Your own deck! The best way to learn vocabulary is to learn words that you actually see in your life. I generally create them from my Zhongwen word list.
Many others are available on the Anki website and online more generally
Training vocabulary with flashcards will take quite some time. It is, therefore, strongly recommended to finely tune the settings of the deck before using it extensively. Suggestions of guides:
Here is my deck setting (it is tailored made and should be tuned at your liking)
# Daily Limits
New cards/day = 5
Maximum reviews/day = 100
# New Cards
Learning steps = 1m 10m 1d 6d
Graduating interval = 7
Easy interval = 10
Insertion order = Random
# Lapses
Relearning steps = 10m 20m
Minimum interval = 2
Leech threshold = 5
Leech action = Tag Only
# Advanced
Maximum interval = 365
Starting ease = 2.50
Easy bonus = 1.30
Interval modifier = 1.10
Hard interval = 1.20
New interval = 0.80
I also created a custom template for the first deck mentionned, which is here.
Here is the list of useful Anki add-ons:
- Auto Ease Factor or Reset Ease: Extensions made in order to avoid the Ease Hell.
- Review Heatmap: Extension to help you visualize past and future review activity.
Other add-ons can be found on this page.
Zhongwen (Browser extension)
Zhongwen is a Chinese pop-up dictionary for browsers (Chrome, Firefox, ...). It is useful to get the translation of specific words on a page by hovering over the word with the mouse.
It is also possible to add the hovered vocabulary to a list by pressing R. The list can be accessed using Alt + W.
The vocabulary list can be downloaded and added to ANKI.
If you have some text that you want to analyze using the browser extension zhongwen, you can paste it into awfice.
It is possible to make the dynamic lookup of subtitles work directly in the browser (at least in Mozilla). Two extensions are needed, as well as a little hack:
- Install Zhongwen
- Install Subfilter
- Go to the show or movie you want to watch, and change the language from the extension Subfilter to Simplified Chinese. (Obviously, the media do need to have Chinese subtitles available.)
- Press
F11to put it full screen (Zhongwen does not work full screen on Netflix).
One of the main tricks I used while studying in China. You can convert many different formats into PDFs (by printing them). You can then convert them into HTML (using this website for example) and use them in the browser to have a pop-up dictionary with zhongwen.
Note: You might have to give Zhongwen permission to access files on your local file system, at least on Chrome.
Some Chinese novels are available for free online in an HTML format. It is perfect for our new favorite trick, the pop-up dictionary.
Example of a free book : 三体,
Douban is the main website to watch the score of different movies/TV shows. It is the equivalent of IMDB.
If you want to search for very specific TV shows, you can take a look at the tool I wrote : douban-crawler
Youku, iQIYI and MangoTV are kind of Netflix style. In general there is always one or two great TV shows on them that are exclusive and makes you want to subscribe. The Subscription is very very cheap as far as I remember. However the selection of "good" TV shows is quite limited. It can be nice to subscribe just some months to watch them.
The equivalent of youtube in China. However, in contrast to Youtube, Netflix, ..., the platform does not have built-in subtitles. It is, therefore, less convenient to learn Chinese with this platform.
I liked this one because when I start watching Chinese TV Shows, it has 爸爸去哪儿. This show is great for beginner.
The equivalent of Coursera in Chinese, you can use the Zhongwen + full screen (F11) mode in order to have the possibility of a dictionary pop-up when watching classes.
Netflix can be used to learn Chinese! Thanks to the hack explained here.
The platform contains many Chinese courses. It is not free; however, it works as a one-time purchase. Very clean and exceptionally well made. The classes are based on the books from BLCU.
Shows and movies with a built-in lookup of the Chinese subtitles are available. It is extremely well made; however, the selection of shows having the feature was quite poor several years ago.
Website similar to Quora, where all the new trends are discussed, questions are asked, ... It seems a great way to know the latest trends.
Most popular news aggregator in China. That can be nice to hear the latest events in China.
The chinese twitter. Also a great way to discover the current trends. However, in contrary to Zhihu, you need to know some accounts to follow, and it can be daunting to find nice feeds in the beginning, especially without a deep Chinese understanding. I therefore never really hooked up to that platform.
A lot of free ebooks, podcast and else. It is one of the most popular application of this genre. I mainly used this one in the past.
Most of the books present in the websites/applications (even behind paywalls) that has just been listed are not accessible outside of China. I tried to subscribe to most of them and couldn't have access to the popular book from France (I did try using the VPN of my school to pretend that I was in China and it didn't work either).
The two following platforms are great to listen to Chinese songs and songs in general. The subscription is quite inexpensive in comparison to services such as Deezer or Spotify.
Shufazidian is a website as well as a mini program that display the character selected in different style of writing. It is extremely helpful when learning to do some calligraphy.
How to write Chinese character (Android application)
It is an excellent android application for learning how to write characters as well as stroke orders.
Animated stroke order for Chinese characters (In Browser)
A website that can show the stroke orders of the inputed characters.
Two primary chinese-english dictionaries are popular. Both have a free version, and a version where you have a one-time purchase to get more vocabulary (definitely worth it). Some comparisons exist on the internet. I am more a hanping user, I prefer the ergonomy of it. However, I do know that in general people prefer Pleco.
The best translator, not available in China.
Works in China.
Potplayer is a really powerful multimedia player. If you own some videos with Chinese subtitles, you can dynamically search online the words that you clicked on.
This can be set in :
Preferences => Subtitles => Research by word
You need to put %%SS where the word from the subtitle will be in the URL query. I generally redirect the query to MDBG:
https://www.mdbg.net/chinese/dictionary?page=worddict&wdrst=0&wdqb=%%SS
Excellent smartphone application to listen to audiobook files. You can easily load files from your local storage, do +/- 20 seconds, and set sleep timers.
Superb community to find language partner, and ask all the questions related to the language.
中法中法 - Chinois et Francais (Discord)
中英交流 - Chinese-English Language Exchange (Discord)
Online language platform to find teachers for 1-on-1 tutoring. I did not personnally used it, but I heard good things about it.
Stack overflow thread regarding this issue.
It is a small tool I wrote in order to do some shadowing using the deck mentioned in the Flashcards section.
Here are some Chinese OCRs for converting an image to text using the computer (It can be pretty helpful if you want, for example, put the Chinese textbook's vocabulary list into your Anki deck).
It is a converter that transforms Chinese characters into pinyin. Such can be very useful, especially when creating Anki cards or else.
- Lexilogos
- ChineseConverter (Seems to have many different nice tools, including conversion traditional<=>chinese)