Teaching materials for learning Chinese are provided here. There are sites where you may find interesting instructions suitable for you. Here are some sites to begin your surfing.

    You may start with these pages from this website — just to get a little taste of it without working too hard.

    A Is For Love

    Flash cards for learning a few Chinese words

    Listening to the sound of Chinese

    Play a few words of Chinese on your computer.

    A few Chinese words

    Each word is enlarged for easy study.

    If you are studying Chinese, these tools can help.

    Zhongwen site

    More than a dictionary!

    Clavis Sinica

    Excellent program by Professor David Porter. It displays a whole document in Chinese [GB] or [BIG5], and gives individual word's definition, pronunciation as well as much more information when you click on that word. If you are studying Chinese, this is a very useful tool.

    Chinese Character Visual Dictionary

    If you like to know more, go to the following sites on the Internet.

    The Chinese Outpost

    Pronunciation, Character and Grammar By Mark Andrew Baker. The best. A must-visit site.

    Learn Cantonese / Mandarin Online

    Internet Based Chinese Teaching and Learning

    Rainland Kids discover Chinese — Site is in Germany

    If you want to have a better understanding of China, go to this one.

    Wanfang Data

    As an affiliate (分支) of Chinese Ministry of Science & Technology, Wanfang Data has been the leading information provider in China since 1950s. With a wide range of database resources and value-added services, Wanfang Data has become a gateway to understanding Chinese culture, medicine, business, science, etc.

    Life-Changing Science Discoveries

    Here's a look at some discoveries that have changed the world. It's impossible to rank their importance, so they're listed in the order they were discovered

Micro-organism

    Before French chemist Louis Pasteur began experimenting with bacteria in the 1860s, people did not know what caused disease. He not only discovered that disease came from micro-organisms, but also realized that bacteria could be killed by heat and disinfectant(消毒剂). This idea caused doctors to wash their hands and disinfect their instruments, which has saved millions of lives.

Penicillin

    Antibiotics are powerful drugs that kill dangerous bacteria in our bodies that make us sick. In 1928, British Alexander Fleming discovered the first antibiotic, penicillin, which he grew in his lab. Without antibiotics, infections like strep throat could be deadly

DNA

    On February 28, 1853, James Watson of the United States and Francis Crick of England made one of the greatest scientific discoveries in history. The two scientists found the structure of DNA. Our genes are made of DNA and determine how things like what color hair and eye we'll have. In 1962, they were awarded the Nobel Prize for this work . The discovery has helped doctors understand diseases and may someday prevent some illnesses like heart disease and cancer.

X-rays

    Wilhelm Roentgen, a German physicist, discovered X-rays in 1895. X-rays go right through some substances, like flesh and wood, but are stopped by others, such as bones and lead. This allows them to be used to see broken bones or explosives inside suitcases, which makes them useful for doctors and security officers. For this discovery, Roentgen was awarded the first-ever Nobel Prize in Physics in 1901.

    Some people love eating food right after it is cooked. I prefer food just taken out from the freezer. Fruit, candies, nuts, chocolate, cake with buttercream frosting(糖霜), even peas, all of them taste delicious when frozen. In fact, I often eat them that way.

    I was a kid when I picked up the habit. In my family, lots of things were thrown into the freezer — finally, two freezers — to prevent them from going bad. Among them were some of the candies my sisters and I had collected on Halloween.

    If we eat when they are still warm, we'll find ourselves taking the cookies more than we should. It's better if we can put them into the freezer and wait. That way we'll eat less and enjoy them more because they are hard and chewing becomes a slower, more patient effort. That's the point about frozen buttercream frosting. Put it in your mouth at room temperature, and it's gone very quickly. But when it's frozen, you can enjoy the taste much longer as it melts(融化) in your mouth.

    The freezer treats a lot of fruit kindly. Take frozen grapes for example, I keep a bowl of grapes in my freezer. They become a little icy, and somehow their sweetness is improved. They are perfect and healthy dessert(点心). This is the same with oranges, apples, bananas…You might think bananas would get super­hard when frozen. Wrong! They become cool, creamy and sweet. If you have wisely covered some or all of the bananas with melted chocolate before putting them into the freeze, they will have a double taste.

    As long as you aren't eating anything that truly has to be hot, go ahead and experiment.

"You can you up, no can no bb." The latest Chinglish buzz phrase, having swept through Chinese cyberspace (网络空间) and society, has now made a landing overseas, entering the US web-based Urban Dictionary.

According to the entry put forward by "gingerdesu", "You can you up" which means "If you can do it, go ahead and do it", is a Chinglish catch phrases referring to people who criticize others' work, especially when the critic is not so much better.

As well as "You can you up", other Chinglish catch phrases, such as "tuhao" and "no zuo no die", have also been recorded on the site.

    Coined with roots in Chinese grammar, and even containing Pinyin, Chinglish words and phrases are even spreading beyond grass roots (草根) websites.

In 2013, "dama" and "tuhao" found their way into The Wall Street Journal and the BBC, and words such as "feng shui", "Chengguan" and "people mountain people sea" have been admitted to the Oxford English Dictionary.

"The frequent use of Chinglish by foreign institutions suggests that people are looking more to the lifestyle and popular culture of China," says Zhang Yiwu, professor of Peking University's Department of Chinese Language and Literature.

"Words like 'dama' and 'tuhao' are so vivid. My friends and I use them a lot —it's so much fun," said Satoshi Nishida, a Japanese student studying at Beijing Language and Culture University.

"Behind these Chinglish words and phrases is the Chinese culture. They are reflections of the changes and trends in the Chinese society and they help people from other countries to understand what's happening in China," according to Xing Hongbing, a professor of Beijing Language and Culture University.

"When the price of gold went down last year, while the super purchasing power of the Chinese bargain-hunting middle-aged women drew worldwide attention, there was no effective way available in other languages to describe them, and 'dama' filled the gap very neatly," says Xing.

    If you want to get the most out of the study of a language, you must also read for pleasure: novels, plays, travel books, and so on. And in reading books of this kind the important thing is to get on with reading; to try to grasp what the writer is going to tell you in the book as a whole. This is impossible if you stop and think over the meaning of every single word which happens to be unfamiliar. You can not enjoy a story if you stop half a dozen times on every page in order to look up words in the dictionary. You may even prevent yourself from understanding the story as a whole by doing this.

    When you are reading books of this kind, therefore, you will usually have to rely mainly on the context to help you. If you meet an unfamiliar word, do not let it take too much of your attention from the main thread(主线) of the story. In all probability you will meet the same word again a few pages later on in a slightly different context, and each time you see it that your understanding of it will become more exact.

    On a recent spring morning. Susan Alexander, a retired government intelligence analyst, left her Maryland home, climbed into her Volkswagen Passat and drove about three miles to pick up two strangers. She battled rush-hour traffic on the Capital Beltway and George Washington Memorial Parkway before dropping them off at Reagan National Airport. She didn't earn a cent for her trouble, and that was the point.

    Alexander is a member of the Silver Spring Time Bank-one of more than 100 such exchanges around the world trying to build community by exchanging time credits for services instead of dollars and cents. "I have time," she said. "I like giving the gift of time to other people."

    In Alexander's case, passengers Mary and Al Liepold were grateful for the ride, but it wasn't charity. Mary, a retired writer and editor for nonprofit organizations, used time credits she banked for editing work and baking. Senior citizens who don't drive, the Liepolds cashed in their credits to catch a flight to Montreal for a five-day vacation.

    Without money changing hands or shifting between virtual accounts, the airport drop-off was more like a coffee party than a taxi ride. Driver and passengers chatted about projects they've completed for the time bank, and no one raised an eyebrow when Mary said she likes "to avoid the conventional economy."

    "The beauty of this is that you make friends," Mary Liepold said. "You don't just get services."

    The Silver Spring Time Bank formed in 2015 and has about 300 members, said co-founder Mary Murphy. Last year, she said, l,000 hours were exchanged for basic home repairs, dog walking, cooking and tailoring, among other services, without the exchange of money. "You get to save that money that you would have spent," she said. "You get to meet somebody else in your community and get to know that person. That's a bonus that's part of an exchange."

    A deal performed partly to make friends would seem to go against classical economics and one of Benjamin Franklin's most memorable sayings: "Time is money." To those at the forefront of modem time-banking, that is the appeal.