kepo-ing Zz85

There are many good language tools online and free software for learning and studying Chinese, but have 1 website and 1 freeware that I like to recommend after recently used them - CCDICT- the online Chinese dictionary and WAKAN- Freeware tool for Japanese and Chinese language learners for Windows. Infact its a means of improving your Chinese, English, Cantonese or other dialects, Japanese and Korean with them.

Its a world of difference, my dad is well verse in different languages and dialects, but languages are my worst subjects - verbally, practically, and academically (maybe not that bad for computer languages). My dad taught me how to use a chinese dictionary when I was young. The most common method is by “hanyu pinyin” 汉语拼音, the standard way of pronouncing words using roman characters (Chinese Google/è°·æ­Œ has an auto pinyin conversion built into its search). However, at times my pinyin basics are weak or when you don’t know how to read the word you are looking for, there you look up the word via radical stroke. You take what seems to be the “suffix” of the word, and then look-up by the number of strokes in the character. Stroke is also one of the ways you can input Chinese text with on your hand-phone.

So back to the topic, the recommended website - languages of china is a web front to its ccdict database (both downloadable), buts its very powerful yet in a simple interface. You can lookup via radical/stroke, hanyupinyin, english translation, and finding the characters gives pronunciations in Chinese and dialects, simplified and traditional chinese, and explanation in English.

和漢wakan project is what I found after I wanted all these features off-line/ downloaded. Its also very powerful and feature packed, in so you might require some time to explore its features and find out how to get what you need. I recommend you download its installer first.

If you are interested to find much more good tools (both freeware and online sites), you can search for their databases, namely CEDICT (Chinese-English Dictionary), EDICT (Japanese-English Dictionary), KDICT so on… there should be one something which suit your needs - including for palm and j2me