Learning Chinese with NCIKU
Today Su (my wife 老婆 [lǎopó]) sent me a link to this site called http://www.nciku.com/ . I took a quick glance around the site and from what I see its pretty neat. It looks like the perfect web based tool for English to Chinese translations. My other resources are http://www.chinese-tools.com/ and Rosetta Stone. But back to NCIKU, this site is very feature rich.
It has a Conversations section which lists numerous conversations you may have and displays in both english, chinese, and pinyin. Pinyin is the Romanization of chinese into english. Its the english phonetical way to pronounce chinese words. The conversation piece is cool because it even has audio to help you with the 4 different tones you find in the chinese language. That has been the hardest thing for me so far is the 4 tones. Every word has 4 tones, and each tone has a different meaning. So basically for each word there are 4 different meanings. CRAZY!
There is also a Q&A section where users can post their questions and get responses from other users on the site. Its like a social networking site for bridging the gap between english and chinese speaking people. Just what I need! How cool!
Other sections include "Theme Words" which shows a picture and gives you the english, chinese, and pinyin words with audio. It even has a little box on the top of the front page which allows you to draw the Chinese character and it will translate it for you! This will come in handy as long as my mouse drawing skills are up to par. There is also a tools section which I will have to take a closer look at. Overall the site is extremely useful for me and should aid me in my efforts to learn Chinese.
So for todays lesson we learn the following:
讨老婆
take a wife; get married
http://www.nciku.com/search/zh/detail/%E8%80%81%E5%A9%86/1309162#
Additional Update:
Further research into the site led me to the blog. On the blog the authors post a daily lesson for writing chinese characters. Each day they post 5 new characters and show in an animation how to draw the character. The language in its entirity takes an extremely long time to learn, but bits and pieces every day will surely make the job much less difficult.
