two things!

[highways]

First, I can't believe I've been studying Mandarin for a year and a half and in all this time, until now nobody ever pointed me to this site. It's basically a dictionary but you can use your mouse to draw characters (or a vague approximation of them) and it'll look them up for you. Very useful for finding the meanings of characters you can't pronounce.

Secondly, has anyone had any luck learning bopomofo? I'm learning now because they use it so often here in Taiwan, but I'm not having much luck finding any resources on it except the Wikipedia entry.

Comments

[livrebleu]

Oh, useful! Thanks!

I'm just starting, but I'm really finding this website very helpful, too.

Regarding bopomofo, if you find anything, I'd also be interested. (Have you already tried googling "Zhuyin fuhao"?)

[soukup]

Hi! Oh my God! You don't know me, and I realize that this post was made over a year ago, but I just have to say, thank you so much for making my life so much easier! I used to take Mandarin classes, but none of the dictionaries I could find were useful for looking up hanzi whose pinyin spellings I didn't know. (When I asked the prof for advice and tried to explain what I was having trouble with, she honestly could not understand what my problem was.) So this site is an absolute lifesaver!

Incidentally, are there any half-decent [paper] Mandarin-English/English-Mandarin dictionaries or study books you could recommend? I've been searching, but for some reason all the ones I've found are next to useless, and as a result I'm making very slow progress now I'm on my own with this.

Either way, THANK YOU SO MUCH for posting this link! I'm sure I sound very caffeinated using all these caps and exclamation points, but that is just how happy I am right now.

[highways]

I have never had any luck with paper dictionaries for Chinese -- I studied in Taiwan, where they don't use pinyin, and picked up an electronic dictionary. If you're not a native speaker, IMO, using something electronic is a lot easier. However you'd don't have to shell out a few hundred bucks for an electronic dictionary if you've got a smart phone? If you have an iPhone or an iTouch or an Android or something like it you can download a Mandarin dictionary program pretty easily and cheaply (or, alternately, just use the NCIKU mobile site.)

Haha, glad to help! :D