Summary

Dig Mandarin has about eight different types of courses, many of which focus on the HSK exams. You can specify which aspect of the HSK you want to work on, or you can take a full HSK course for each level that focuses on character writing, vocabulary, grammar, and HSK mock exams. One of the teachers on the site uses animations and colourful videos for her lessons, while the rest use simple PowerPoint presentations. Watching their videos feels similar to attending a university class, which may or may not be your style. They do seem to thoroughly cover the HSK curriculum if that is your only goal — if your goal is to become functional in Chinese, however, perhaps consider investing a little more into courses from YoYo Chinese or ChineseFor.Us, especially if you’re a beginner to intermediate learner. Besides the courses, Dig Chinese has some helpful articles, including some that differentiate between words with similar meanings (like 连忙, 急忙, and 匆忙). They also have sections on learning vocabulary, but these pages are simply lists of vocabulary words with an image and a recording — if you are determined to actually learn new words, use Pleco‘s Flashcards or Ninchanese instead.

Summary

Summary

Bai Xue started her Youtube channel seven years ago and still updates relatively regularly. She has over 200 videos, which are basically PowerPoint presentations with a voiceover description of each lesson. The videos could be helpful for intermediate and beginner learners, especially the ones that differentiate between words with similar sounds or meanings. Her other lessons focus on dialogues, word lists, and tongue twisters, and she often explains literal translations of sentences to help you understand how the language is structured. However, Xue Bai seems to teach like she is giving a lecture rather than a presentation, so the videos are not very dynamic. Whether or not you enjoy the videos is dependent on your learning style — the information is helpful as long as you can sit through them. If you prefer to read short and concise grammar explanations, Chinese Grammar Wiki may be a better option. Chinese Corner and YoYo Chinese also have some engaging videos about Chinese culture and language.

Summary

HanziCraft is a free dictionary that can help you understand simple decompositions of Chinese characters. The site will indicate the radicals that make up each character, pronunciation clues, and example words that contain the character. It’s probably a good idea to combine HanziCraft with the Zhongwen Chrome Extension because many of the word lists do not have pinyin or English translations.  Hanzicraft is a simple site, developed and maintained by one person (Niel de la Rouviere). Most of the information is compiled from other sites that have done extensive research. Its interface is more intuitive compared to MDBG and Zhongwen, but if you are looking to purchase the mobile app you may want to look into other options. You can try Outlier Linguistics, a Pleco add-on, or YellowBridge, a dictionary website that includes similar features and more.

Summary

The free Zhongwen Chrome extension is easy to use. Simply download the extension and activate it whenever you are on a site with Chinese characters — both traditional and simplified. When you hover over a character, you will see a pop up with several definitions. At first, it seems like this is all Zhongwen has to offer, but one quick glance at the keyboard shortcuts popup will tell you differently. You can add words to a wordlist (and export that list to Anki), directly add words to Skritter flashcards, or open a quick shortcut to dictionary sites like Forvo and Line. The shortcut list is a bit finicky, so you may have to click the Zhongwen extension icon and take a screenshot to remember what each key does. Unfortunately, the app can’t translate full sentences, and sometimes when characters are part of a hyperlink you can only receive the definition of the first word. Nevertheless, Zhongwen is a free app that can improve your Chinese reading experience. Readlang is a similar application that has less thorough definitions, but it allows you to translate full sentences (although this is a paid feature). With Readlang, the translations will remain on the screen until you intentionally remove them. Both of these apps can be used together depending on your needs.