Quick: What, in your opinion, are the very best no-cost Chinese language study tools in the world? You have twenty seconds to name them.
And note, we don’t mean “lessons” for the most part; instead, we mean the tools you use to supplement your lessons, look things up, do methodical reviews, handle and convert text, and so on.
Also, you don’t have to say The Chinese Outpost’s Language Tutorial. It’s not a study tool; it’s a high-level overview to give beginners their intial bearings.
OK, are you done with your list? Great. How many tools did you come up with? Three? Five? Twenty?
Or were you tempted to go here or here to birddog a few favorites?
Don’t get me wrong, those are great, comprehensive lists that Drs. Xie and Chan have put together.
But if someone asked you to pick from those the tools that they can really use now to help their rubber-hits-the-road studies, which of the hundreds of possibilities would you recommend?
It’s an excellent question, and as an answer, in case you haven’t discovered it, some of the good folks over at Chinese-Forums.com have created (and continually update) a list of their recommended “Best of Chinese Study Tools.”
The first post in this thread is updated periodically after new suggestions are made and discussed–it’s selection by committee, more or less–but the result is a list of around 40 useful resources instead of the hundreds you’ll find via lists elsewhere that aim to include everything in the canon of Chinese language study tools.
These resources are divided into logical groupings such as Dictionaries | Annotators | Text Editors | Vocabulary/Flashcards, and so on.
Check out the list often for updates (and participate in the discussion, if you like) at Chinese-Forums.com.
