If you would like to learn more about Chinese characters, check out the Chineasy app and accompanying resources, which facilitate the memorization of characters, especially pictographic ones, by pairing them with images of what they represent. For a more in-depth (as well as humorous) look at the many aspects of the Chinese writing system that make it difficult for native speakers of Western European languages to learn, see David Moser’s essay “Why Chinese is So Damn Hard.” 

If you would like to know more about China’s many dialects and historical efforts to unify its language, David Moser also wrote a book on this topic, called A Billion Voices: China’s Search for a Common Language.

This website at the Chinese Text Project lists all 214 radicals by number of strokes in each one. When you click on a radical, the site will provide information including how the look of the radical has changed over time with the evolution of Chinese scripts and all of the characters in the Chinese language that include that radical.

Interested in learning how to speak Chinese? There are a plethora of great resources available for free online and in app stores. One of the most popular is Duolingo, a free app that will take you through a complete, gamified learning program covering reading, listening, and pronunciation skills. Memrise, a smart flashcard website, uses spaced repetition algorithms to determine the best times to review given words for maximal vocabulary retention. For a reliable English-Chinese dictionary, look no further than the Pleco Chinese dictionary app, available in the Google Play Store or the Apple Store. Finally, for opportunities to interact with native Chinese speakers for free, check out Dickinson College’s free online platform the Mixxer.

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