www.hutong-school.com/5-free-tools-learn-chinese

www.v.ifeng.com – Good news/video source.

www.youtube.com – 世纪大视野 (Great history documentary program) 锵锵三人行 (Discussion program, the 主持人 is great)

www.mitbbs.com/news/mitbbs_news.php – Good news source.

www.nciku.com – nciku is my drug of choice for dictionaries, it has the best character recognition software I’ve run across, and also has a good C-C dictionary

Rock In China is a fantastic resource for finding rock, metal, hip hop, and jazz artists.
www.rockinchina.com/w/Main_Page

I also search for dubs on video sharing websites of popular english movies dubbed into mandarin.
There’s absolutely tons of them out there.

I can’t really seem to find many english TV shows in mandarin though, come across a couple like South Park and some other cartoons like Spider-Man and Batman but that’s about it.
Anyone know if any good shows have been dubbed?

Also Amazon.cn *sometimes* accepts my US credit cards and *sometimes* won’t. I’ve written them for help, but their tech support has much to be desired.

Pleco is NOT cheap but it IS awesome. In the US itunes store anyway, it’s $150 for the full suite ($100 for students–on the honor system), and it’s worth paying to get the full version. (It doesn’t work when you lose service though, so looking up words when you’re stuck in the subway is not going to happen.)

I also love nciku (www.nciku.com/) when I don’t have my iPhone handy–it lets you write in characters like pleco does, but isn’t as picky as some other sites at how pretty it looks. It has two Chinese-English dictionaries and a Chinese-Chinese one, and lots of example sentences. (It’s not perfect, though, and their new Japanese dictionary is really not there yet.)

Last thing: the best way to get a handle on how real Chinese people speak is to venture on the BBSs, which are full of slang and in-jokes. It can be a little overwhelming at first, so you may want to check out Chinasmack.com, which translates some of the most popular threads and gives a slang dictionary. Hard-core people may want to check out the new book on Chinese slang, Niu Bi! (www.amazon.com/Niubi-Chinese-Never-Taught-School/dp/0452295564). It is, like, crazy dirty but so, so handy online.

www.qiyi.com/

It has a nice interface and some good programs.

www.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/chinese/top/index.html

Useful for anyone in their news phase of learning — the podcasts are all transcribed.

The news tends to be a little Japan-centric, though.

one (slightly) related question: How do you keep your Chinese SRS sentences short? You mentioned before that you like to copy out your sentences, which I do as well, but they’re always far too long to produce without getting a huge cramp. When I try to make my sentences shorter, they always end up being context-less phrases that don’t really mean anything interesting by themselves. Any advice?