Comments: CHINESE LITERATURE ONLINE.

I'm teaching myself to read Chinese and was pointed to zhongwen.com early — it's absolutely wonderful. However, I only know about 60 characters, so it's going to be a while before I can actually read anything there; I mostly just use the dictionaries for other purposes. :-)

Posted by Chris at July 27, 2003 07:11 PM

Ah - finally a language I know something about! Here are more resources:

http://www.yale.edu/chinesemac/pages/study_tools.html#texts

Posted by Kerim Friedman at July 27, 2003 08:03 PM

Testing if I can make that link clickable...

Looks like I can!

Posted by Kerim Friedman at July 27, 2003 08:05 PM

While you are over at the Chinese Mac web site, check out this page on Characters and Encodings. Lots of interesting information about Unicode...

Posted by Kerim Friedman at July 27, 2003 08:07 PM

I've been trying to learn Mandarin for some while now, and I found zhongwen dot com a while back. I even went so far as to buy their (rather cheap) dead tree version. It uses Pinyin, it's up-to-date vocabulary-wise, and it as a website, it's what it should be.

Posted by jim at July 27, 2003 08:55 PM

I used Zhongwen.com a lot when I was studying Chinese too. I'm not properly set up to read Chinese on Solaris, so it helps to have an all-GIF site.

I'm trying to go back to studying Chinese in September, and if I want to make the intermediate class instead of taking elementary for the, like, sixth time, I expect I'll be using it a lot too. The hardest thing is that I expect my class to use simplified characters, and as a product of the California community college system, I only know traditional. Wigged out the first time I saw "ge4" in simplified characters.

I expect I'll get in trouble for having a bopomofo dictionary too, but at least I know pinyin.

Posted by Scott Martens at July 28, 2003 05:55 AM

Simplified characters are ugly.

Posted by language hat at July 28, 2003 08:23 AM

Kerim, can you recommend any texts (online or otherwise, but preferably inexpensive ones) for beginners?

Posted by Chris at July 28, 2003 04:58 PM

Can anyone recommend a cheap or free Chinese word-processing software? (I use Windows/98 Office 2000 right now). I can cut and paste Unicode characters one at a time, but I'm hoping for something more convenient. MSWORD has something called Mingliu, but it's ugly and hard to search (unless there's a way I don't know about).

Posted by zizka at July 28, 2003 06:33 PM

Chris,

Here is a good place to start. There are a lot more options available over at Marjorie Chan's web page. To get the most up-to-date information I suggest subscribing to the Kenyon e-mail list mentioned on Chan's site.

Posted by Kerim Friedman at July 28, 2003 08:39 PM

Zizka,

You should also look over at Marjorie Chan's site. here is her list of software. Windows XP has very good Chinese support built-in. But I use mac so I can't tell you about other PC software...

Posted by Kerim Friedman at July 28, 2003 08:40 PM

Kerim, you are hereby named Languagehat's Official China Hand. Wear the badge with pride.

Posted by language hat at July 28, 2003 09:15 PM

Thanks, Karim. I'll give the URL to my tech consultant. Any recommendations? I mostly want to be able to quickly and conveniently put up nice looking text using Windows 98 / Office 2000, and it should be Unihan-compatible I guess.

Posted by zizka at July 28, 2003 11:59 PM

Many thanks, Karim!

Posted by Chris at July 29, 2003 06:57 PM