www.中文.com - 很好！

I've not been doing a huge amount of learning this week, but I've tried to listen to the podcasts most days - I tend to listen to each podcast three times, to make sure I can internalise everything and actually learn the material covered. I'll catch up with the flashcards and my summary of the next lesson at some point soon.

I've also been thinking a fair bit about reading and writing Chinese, and I've been looking around for some help on the web. There are obviously two elements: reading is one thing, and I find I'm definitely beginning to recognise the characters I've come across in the Chinesepod transcripts and the ones I've discussed here. However, as I learned when I was starting Japanese, the characters must be written in a particular stroke order, and this is what I'm finding very challenging. If I can recognise now about 20 characters, I don't think I could actually write a single one!

I've just discovered an absolutely fabulous resource at www.zhongwen.com. As far as I'm aware 中文 zhōng wén means the (written) Chinese language, and on this site there's an English - Pinyin - Hanzi dictionary. Let's say I didn't know the symbol for zhōng, but I knew that it was tone 1 and it has something to do with China because I've heard it in zhōng wén, zhōng guó rén, etc. If I enter "zhong" in the pinyin search field I am shown the various characters for zhōng, zhǒng and zhòng, not to mention many compound words. I could click on 中 because I recognise it from zhōng guó down the list. Having clicked on 中. I then get a explanation of the character (click on the image at the bottom of this post to enlarge it).

That's all great... but the best bit is the option to view 中 as an animated character, showing me exactly how to write it! Brilliant! The animated gif below is borrowed from the Ocrat site for Animated Chinese Characters.

Sample image from www.zhongwen.com (click to enlarge):

So I guess I don't have any excuse now!

Comments

[Ewan McIntosh]

That is really cool. I'm sure Meryl and the kids in Perth will find this helpful as they set out to learn some Chinese next year.

[Matt Whyndham]

Zhongwen.com is really good. I particularly like the hyper-hierarchical approach : many ways to find a character. Unlike a traditional dictionary, in which if you get the radical wrong, you are lost.