What a great time to study Chinese and learn about China! There have never been so many resources for the student of Chinese language and culture. On this page you will find links to a number of useful sites.

One might say that memorization is 90% of foreign language learning. This sophisticated flashcard program may help greatly with that process! There are plenty of ready-to-go collections for Chinese to download, and it's also extremely easy to make your own, especially if you download the special Chinese plugin 'pinyin toolkit'. It's a good idea to first watch the intro video on the home page.

 Anyone using the Zhongwen series textbooks should check out their site. It is filled with activities, exercises, and games.

Yellow Bridge has online flashcards, videos, and other resources for Integrated Chinese and other popular textbooks.

Albert Wolfe's Chinese language blog is worth checking out- lots of tips and fascinating language bits!

zhongwen.com Is an online etymological dictionary and more. Look up any character by radical, copy and paste, or pinyin, and get word origin information, see how it’s related to other characters, and more.

Virtual Forbidden City, a Palace Museum– IBM collaboration, allows you to walk around and explore a fully rendered 3-D Forbidden City! You can even chat in English or Chinese with other visitors.

Margie Chan’s China Links at Ohio State University maintains a huge list of online learning resources for Chinese language and culture. Check this one out!

Chinasprout carries many Chinese learning products for children.

Asia for Kids is another source for children’s Chinese language and culture materials.

Language Guide Mandarin is an amazing vocabulary– building site. Just move your mouse over the pictures to get pinyin, characters, and audio!

 Cheng & Tsui  offers many resources for studying Chinese and other East Asian languages and cultures.

 Chinabooks is one of the oldest and largest suppliers of everything Chinese in the US.

nciku  is a great online dictionary that gives many example sentences for any word, pinyin, characters, and even says them in natural-sounding Chinese!.Try it out!

Ever wonder how many characters you know? Take this free online test and find out!

Mandarin Tools is a fascinating site for all things Chinese language.

Here is a great online pronouncing dictionary with other features as well.

Check out Langnet's offerings for reading practice, graded by level.

Here is another good online dictionary

This dictionary incorporates handwriting recognition- handy when you encounter a character that you have no idea how to pronounce, and don't want to go through the trouble of looking up by radical and stroke count (yuk!).

Kuaile Hanyu is an entertaining TV show aimed at foreigners learning Chinese. Try out an episode and ramp up your Chinese!.

Xi Yangyang is a popular Chinese cartoon, which also happens to have lots of useful Chinese. Watch and find out why many Chinese women say 'Hui Tailang' (Grey Wolf) is the 'ideal husband'.

Kuaile Xue Hanyu is a Chinese language show co-hosted by a young American guy who speaks excellent Chinese. Check it our for inspiration!

The Confucius Institute is a superb site for Chinese study.

The Chinese Central Television site for learning Chinese offers short instructional videos and other resources at various levels from beginner on up.

Check out Samuel Xie's "Renminbi and the Chinese Yuan - Facts and History of the Chinese Currency"  to find out all about Chinese currency!

Help us add to this list!

Send your favorite Chinese learning sites to hal@swfcls.org and we'll add them here.