Re-learn Chinese

I have a friend who wants to learn Chinese. I offered to teach him basic Chinese, so I can brush up my own as well.

I think it’s good for me, I ended up re-reading my basic Chinese lesson books and got reminded of all the characters I’ve forgoten.

“The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step” said a very famous Chinese philosopher, I’m not sure who (there are so many of them! Lao Tze, Sun Tzu, etc)

I downloaded and installed WordLookup, a free dictionary for Mac, on my iBook. Url: http://www.lindesay.co.nz/page_wordlookup.shtml

And then downloaded English – Simplified Chinese and English – Traditional Chinese language data. Urls available from the same website.

I played around a bit with it and it’s nice – input a word (in English or in Chinese) and it’ll give out a list of words and phrases, complete with the Chinese character and pinyin pronounciation.

As I used to be in intermediate level in Chinese (and then fall back to beginner mode, as a result of years not using it), I’m familiar with characters, pinyin, pronunciations, and tones. I can use it.

I recommend WordLookup to anyone re-learning Chinese (and on a Mac). It’ll certainly enrich your vocabulary – which is the bulk part of learning Chinese.