APPLICATIONS:
eStroke
http://www.eon.com.hk/estroke/
* This is an invaluable application that, given a character, shows you the stroke order for the character along with all the possible variants of that character (e.g. traditional hanzi, simplified hanzi, kanji, alternative forms, etc), along with the Chinese (pinyin) and Japanese (romaji) pronunciations for the character. It also has the meanings of the character, and a list of words in which the character appears.
* For radicals where the stroke order / form differs across different areas, you can set in the preferences what stroke order and form you would like.
* You can create animated gifs / pngs showing stroke order and export them.
* You can create practice worksheets with a vast array of options and forms for practicing writing one or more hanzi.
* On the surface, this program seems like all it does is show stroke orders, but it does much more that this and is one of the programs I use the most.
* Multiplatform: Mac OS X, Windows, and multiple smartphones / handheld devices.
MDBG Chinese-English Dictionary for OS X Dictionary.app
http://www.mdbg.net/chindict/chindict.ph...ry_mac_osx
* A plugin for Mac OS X's dictionary.app.
* Shows traditional and simplified characters, and all possibilities for a translation in a clear, easy to understand, and colourful format, describing each hanzi along with its pinyin.
Peraperakun Chinese
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox...popup-tra/
* A popup for Mozilla for Chinese text that looks up words in CEDICT.
* Combined with Google translate, which is another resource I use immeasurably, it is fantastic.
Google Translate
http://translate.google.com
* Google's translation engine.
* The actual translation to and from Chinese is lacking, but I don't much use it for this purpose. Instead, I'll just paste Chinese text into the window and then parse it myself by hovering over parts of it with PeraPerakun.
* Very good for translating from simplified to traditional text and vice versa.
* For shorter samples of text, it has a "listen" feature where it reads the text. Although far from ideal, it is one of the better Chinese computer generated vocalizations I've managed to find online, so it can help with pronunciation to a degree.
Excellent podcasts
* ChinesePod
http://www.chinesepod.com
* ChineseClass101
http://www.chineseclass101.com
Along with Anki (which needs no introduction, of course), the New Practical Chinese Reader, the Discovering Chinese and A Magical Tour of China books at
http://www.betterchinese.com, and the classes here in Ottawa through the excellent school we have here in town for Chinese, these are my main resources in my Chinese studies. If I can think of any more resources, I'll be sure to come back, edit this post, and include them.
Hope these are of help to somebody!
BBCode added by admin, sorry HTML doesn't work in the forum posts. Thanks for sharing.
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