Learn Yu Wen Learn Chinese language and culture.

Hello, 大家好！

      I would like to share with you some essential computer resources that I think are very useful for learning Chinese. Of course this list is not comprehensive, so I try to keep it into a minimal size. For me these are essential, stable resources, which I've been using for a few years. All are free Internet resources, except the first one.

(1) Windows XP (or upper) Chinese IME 3.0
     - allows us to input chinese character by typing pinyin and choosing the character(s) we want; Google pinyin seems to be derived from that software, but its menu are all in Chinese;
[this software comes with Windows XP and upper, but usually needs to be installed and/or activated]

(2) Arphic Public License Chinese fonts
These marvelous fonts were put into public domain by the manufacturer on 1999.
Link: http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/non-gnu/chinese-fonts-truetype/

(3) Pinyinput
Type in pinyin with number and get characters with tones, everywhere in Windows, in a similar way you obtain Chinese characters with IME 3.0.
Link: http://pinyinput.sourceforge.net/

Here are two web sites I consider as essential:

(4) Pin1Yin1, by Paul Grayson: a free site based on the Unihan database and the CEDICT Chinese-English Dictionary. There we can obtain pinyin and zhuyin annotations, and some literal translations for Chinese short texts. Such translations seem to stimulate us to recognise Chinese sentence structures, as well as to look at other combinations and meanings for a single character.
Link: http://www.pin1yin1.com

(5) Google Translate: have you visited it recently? There's new improvements, like type pinyin and obtain a suggestion, listen (from a very fine text to speech software), and read phonetically (pinyin) for the chinese text.
Link: http://translate.google.com/?hl=&ie=UTF-8&text=&sl=zh-CN&tl=en#zh-CN|en|

     I hope this might be helpful for other Chinese language students.

     See you. 再见！

          José.
          从 南美洲 - 巴西 - 巴西利亚