Welcome to Gaia! ::

I've been collecting links of all kinds for several years now.

Hopefully something here is helpful!

www.chinesepod.com -- Some resources are free, but most of the content costs money. There are quite a few different price points. Excellent, interesting and up-to-date lessons make it a good value. There are interactive features (reader questions have become an entire series called "Qing Wen?") and an active forum community. There's a 20% discount for current college students with proof of registration. Also has on-ground classes and meetings in Shanghai. Recently added some lessons on Shanghainese, which is really different from Mandarin.


www.AskBennyChinese.com -- Also a pay-to-learn site, but still a lot of free content and different levels of membership. Newly revamped website as of Jan. 2010.


http://www.ninhao.com/ -- Another free + pay site, similar to Chinesepod. Has some unique and uniquely Chinese content, such as learning through cartoons and The 36 Strategems.


http://www.chineseclass101.com/ -- Another free + pay site, again very similar to Chinesepod, part of a huge family of language classes. I have not looked into this, but I use and pay for basic membership in the Korean sister site and find it very helpful. They also started a Cantonese site, but it can be tricky to find, not sure why.


http://www.yellowbridge.com/ -- tons of resources, including flash cards linked to several of the most popular textbook series, like Integrated Chinese.


http://english.cntv.cn/learnchinese/ -- CCTV's page for Chinese lessons. Tons of stuff I haven't even started to plow through.


www.studypond.com -- Another pay resource, except you pay up front and your lessons are debited from your account. Access to tutoring, too, though I've not used that service yet.


www.livemocha.com -- Also has tutors, and flash cards.


www.chinese-tools.com -- Learning resources and cool tools like the Chinese Name Gender Guesser, the Pinyin keyboard, and other interesting ways to learn the language and how to write it.


http://www.chinese.cn -- This is the homepage for the Confucius Institute and a great overall resource on China.


http://www.chinese-lessons.com -- Some great basic grammar and pronunciation pages for both Mandarin and Cantonese. Interesting articles about language and culture as well. Free as far as I can tell.


http://chinese.hm68.com/ -- Free Chinese tutorials.


http://learningchineseonline.net/ -- Links to many resources


http://de.mdbg.net/chindict/chindict.php?page=worddict -- online dictionary


http://www.chinesetopinyin.com -- Translates characters to pinyin. Generally quite accurate if you use small chunks of words or short phrases.


http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Chinese_(Mandarin) -- Chinese Wikibook, part of the Wikibooks project of Wikipedia. Lessons, phrases, grammar.


http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Chinesee -- The Wikipedia Wikiversity page for Chinese language. Has both Mandarin (Putonghua) and Cantonese.



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Chinese_dialects -- List of Chinese dialects, with maps, etc... Shows just how complex the Chinese language family is.

For my Chinese classes, I used Chinese Links (you need the textbook and workbook to supplement the site, or else you won't understand anything) and Chinese-tools.com.