Chinese Character Books: Intermediate Books Just Arrived

Intermediate Character books are finally here! Visit our Popping Panda's book section.

This book introduces 300 intermediate words (beginners, check out our red book with 300 Beginning Characters).

There's one page sample down below. As you can see, the book uses Chinese characters and pinyin, but no English translations.

Try our link to Google translations for Chinese to English and English to Chinese. If you type in the word, 左 (zuo -- if you can't see the Chinese character, read below for browser tweaking) you will get "left" (as in the left sandal below).

zuo = 左= left
you = 右 = right

Put them together,
左右 = about (as in the idea of "more or less" or "approximately")

For those of you who are just thinking about trying to learn Chinese, we highly encourage you to get your computer set up to type Chinese! It's really easy to do -- try with the numbers from 1 to 10 below.

On PCs, you usually hit "ctrl" and the space bar at the same time to shift your PC's language (I hear it's easier on a Mac, but I don't know how to do it). Anyhow, once the computer is set up, you just poke around and all the characters start coming up. Use the English keyboard to start writing -- if you were writing "zuo" you'd start with z (all the z words start appearing), then u (zu words appear), and finally o (all the characters written zuo pop up and you choose the one you want).