Tips #1 For Using Our Bilingual Flash Cards

Our flash cards have Chinese characters, pinyin, and English. Since they are delivered to you via email, you can print out lots of copies to use in different ways.

One very useful exercise is to divide the Chinese character cards and English cards into two piles. You can practice alone or make this into a game, which is especially good for children. Pick an English card. Now find the character that matches it. If you are playing this as a game, shuffle the English cards and distribute them among the players. Take turns finding the character matches. The person who matches the most cards wins. You can print out two or more sets of the Chinese cards for this purpose (so that if one person picks incorrectly, that character card will still be available for another person to choose).

How to start learning to read Chinese

It really is easy! Lots of us studied French in high school and ended up thrashing through verb conjugations and lots of odd grammar (with all apologies to the French and not to say that English is at all straightforward). Well, the only thing that is difficult about Chinese is remembering how to write the characters. Everything else is simple!

The trick with reading and writing Chinese is getting started and keeping going. It is a sight word study process, so you have to practice it constantly. Fortunately, this is easier than it sounds. We created two sets of beginning flash cards (they are on our site View Flash Cards and delivered to your email inbox in Adobe PDF format). There are beginning phrase cards to go with these flash cards, too.

Once you know a few beginning characters (see earlier posts for some samples), basic books become accessible as do subtitles on movie DVDs. Our Strawberry Shortcake DVDs for children have bilingual subtitles and prove very useful to children learning characters.

Adults should look for anything on DVD in Chinese with subtitles. Find something you like, so you'll watch it. Pick out the characters you know and don't get frustrated with the ones you don't know. If you keep studying the characters and watching the DVDs, things will begin to make sense. Plus, and this is a big one, watching the characters in subtitle form let you soak in the proper pronunciation and tones. This is important because everyone internalizes the pronunciation of pinyin into whatever one's native language is...so, if your native language is English, even if you know that pinyin is supposed to be pronounced a certain way, your mind defaults to English pronunciation ("ou" will stick in your mind as ou in cloud, which is wrong, for example).

Check out the earlier post on learning to write Chinese on a computer. Typing in Chinese helps so much because it lets you practice faster and more frequently. PC users just need to install the Asian language pack from their Windows installation CD.

Questions? Comments? Just let us know!

A Few More Dora Words: Big Red Chicken in Mandarin Chinese

If you are looking at words for Dora the Explorer in Mandarin Chinese, check earlier posts first (and if the Chinese characters below aren't clear, see earlier notes on reading Simplified Characters online).

Words from Dora #1's Big Red Chicken:

红色 = hong se = red (literally hong=red and se=color, but if someone asks you what color something is, you'd reply "hong se" and not "hong")

小 = xiao = small
大 = da = big

鸡= ji = chicken

For those of you who haven't watched this episode, the big red chicken starts out as a small red chicken...It will all be clear, even if you speak and read NO Chinese.

Introduction to Chinese Characters: A Great Beginner's Book

A fabulous introduction to Chinese characters for children and adults!

Best of all, no experience is needed to start. Just pick up the book and begin learning.

All the words have English translations! They also have pinyin (pronunciation guide) and stroke order (a step by step guide to writing the characters). Perfect for starting out.


For example, the number "1" in Chinese is super simple (check earlier blog posts for more on numbers). Did you know that "yi" (one) pretty much uses the same pronunciation as si in Spanish (for all of you Dora watchers out there)?

"100" is also pretty easy!

You will see the small words on the bottom right side of the two samples on the left. These are extra words that show you how this character is used in a compound word (if you add these samples, this red book gives you an additional 1200 words!)

Buy these books on our site

Dora: How do you say "Backpack" in Chinese?

(If you get gibberish where the Chinese characters should be, see our notes below about adjusting your Internet browser to view Simplified Chinese)

Check out the video clip at the bottom of this post to see Backpack singing...

背包，背包，背包。。。我是背包！

beibao, beibao, beibao...wo shi beibao!

backpack, backpack, backpack..I am backpack!

beibao = 背包

bao = 包 = bag

for example, shu = 书 = book

so,

shubao = 书包 = book bag!




Browse our Dora collection

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).