global_jd

China History Forum

China History Forum is a discussion board, with what seem to be some great conversations. The above link goes to the "Chinese Language Help and Discussion" section. The conversations are in English, but there's knowledge of many languages within this group, and it sounds like some of the participants have known each other for awhile. Newbie questions too, though, even though there are FAQs pinned to the top. I found it through a search, and ended up on a fascinating discussion of naming foreign cities. Wanted to get this link into the archives here.

Oculture audio

Links to a good collection of language-learning resources. It's wider than deep.

Danwei.org

Danwei is an English-language "best of Chinese media". I haven't been able to tell which filters it puts on the news. Seems a handy way to keep up with blog-worthy items in the Chinese-language press.

Free FSI courses

Coolness... the US government's Foreign Service Institute has been transferring their courseware to free online materials in PDF and MP3. Tons of material. They're publishing a language at a time. I've gone through some of this material, from secondhand bookstores, and it's classroom-oriented, but suitable for self-study... lots of drill work. Good stuff!

China radio online

Two quick links here, so I don't need to evaluate lesser candidates again... Multilingual Books has a good listing of Chinese radio on the internet, as does Surfmusic from Germany. (Many similar sites have dead links.)

China net TV

TV Bistro carries various CCTV stations (government stations), as well as a few others I haven't yet audited. Playback is mostly in Windows Media, with some in Real format, although their front page uses SWF. Jumping up a level reveals web video for other regions. (I'm having difficulty with some of their interfaces, though... WMP chrome isn't coming up a timely fashion for all stations.)

ChinesePod

This site features ~20M audio files, transcripts, and enhanced transcripts for subscription. Sounds like a good one, I'll investigate it on a faster connection.

Update, March 2009: I'm closing comments on this entry, because for some reason this one seems a persistent target of Russian spammers. Wish they had a brain.

International Phonetic Alphabet

Here's Wikipedia on IPA... now I wish I had learned how to read this earlier, would have made it easier to know exactly what sound was intended, across textbooks and languages. (I haven't found an accessible resource yet to learn it, though.)

Some websites I like

Word2Word.com has links to free courses in varied languages... Zhongwen.com has a great online glossary system, but I've gotten lost a few times using it... OmniGlot is the best mini-encyclopedia I've found for writing systems, scripts, and the technical angles across languages... Rosetta Project is another cross-language reference site... Wikipedia articles also tend to be quite good, although sometimes academic (try clicking their local links for more)... PopJisyo will reprocess a web page from the target language, and provide rollovers glosses for chinese characters (there's another one too, but PopJisyo worked in my browser)... sites like OnlineNewspapers or World-Newspapers link to many online newspapers in the target language (just seeing what a newspaper covers is instructive)... there are usually online communities of language learners or ex-patriates too, but these vary group to group, month to month.

Audio Scriptures

The site offers Old and New Testament in various languages, in MP3 format.