Welcome

This website has primarily been created to help myself learn Mandarin by using the language as much as possible to express myself. I would also like to invite you, the visitor to my site, to join me in this quest. Whether you are a new or experienced student or a native mandarin speaker or perhaps you are just an interested passer-by, I welcome you to my website and invite you to avail yourself of the information provided and to join the discussions in the site message board (see forum link in upper and side menus).

Chinese Characters:

The Chinese language is not represented by an alphabet of letters like English, Greek etc. Instead, it is represented through pictures: pictograms representing an object, event or idea.

To enable the Chinese characters to be used on the web pages, the html document coding has been set to Simplified Chinese (GB2312).

To be able to read and see the pictograms you will need both your operating system and browser to be configured to support simplified Chinese characters.

中文 If the characters on the left do not appear to be chinese text (see picture below) then your browser and/or operating system are not configured to display Chinese Characters.

Here is a jpeg picture of the characters that you should see displayed

Chinese characters may also be represented by pinyin eg zhōng wén: the accents on top of the letters represent the 4 tones used in Mandarin. A 5th, neutral tone is also used.

I expect to be using simplified Chinese characters for the majority of the text but I may use traditional Chinese characters where appropriate.

The Links:

I will attempt to add useful links to my link page. If you find a link is not working or you would like to suggest additional links, then please leave a message in the forum

Resources

Whilst I am hardly in a position to help anyone with the mandarin study at this early stage of my training, I will nevertheless, try to add some useful information I currently have. As time goes by, and my language skills improve, perhaps I may be able to help others.

I will welcome the input of all visitors to the site.

The sort of information I expect to be added to the resources page will be:

• Useful phrases
• Expression of ideas
• Hints and tricks
• etc

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