Arch Chinese is an online Chinese character learning tool for Mandarin Chinese language learners. Designed from the start specifically for English speakers who have no or little knowledge of Mandarin Chinese, it offers a rich set of features with a slick and easy-to-use user interface.
The features of the system are distilled from the user feedback and feature requests from the Chinese learning community. We also consult with Chinese teaching professionals, from preschools to universities, to incorporate their suggestions and ideas. Our ultimate goal is to provide a high quality, accessible learning system to help Chinese language learners to study Mandarin Chinese in a practical, effective and enjoyable manner.
Key features include:
- Animates stroke order for ALL the Chinese characters defined in the national standard character set of mainland China and 7,000 frequently-used characters in the traditional Chinese character set, which is used in Taiwan and Hong Kong
- Generates character writing worksheets with stroke sequences, English definitions and Pinyin in PDF format for offline handwriting practice. It is also great for Chinese language teachers to create teaching materials. Here is a writing worksheet example
- Powerful and flexible character and phrase search solution. Users can search characters, phrases and example sentences in Chinese-English dictionary and sentence repository by Pinyin, radicals, English word, English phrase, English sentence, English sentence fragments, Chinese characters, Chinese phrases or Chinese sentence fragments. Furthermore, you can mix English, Chinese character or phrase and Pinyin in your search query. Search results are ordered by usage frequency and complexity
- Chinese character decomposition explorer allows you to drill down into the character components one layer at a time. It helps you understand what components a character is made up from and how characters are related to each other
- Displays common example phrases and sentences using the character and their English translations
- ArchMemo, an innovative Spaced Repetition System (SRS) to help you learn Chinese characters and phrases efficiently and effectively. You can use the pre-defined flashcards or create your own.
- Provides Standard Mandarin Chinese Pinyin Table, the complete listing of all Pinyin syllables used in standard Mandarin, including possible tone variations and their pronunciations. Users can view all the Chinese characters (along with English definitions) that have identical pronunciation but different meanings.
- Features Chinese Radical Table to help users look up a character easily. The table lists all the radicals for the simplified Chinese characters with English being the tool tips. You can click a radical to view the characters with the radical. For some common radicals, such as 扌 and 木, there may be hundreds of characters with the radicals. The system allows you to perform two-level sorting, first level by stroke count, usage frequency or Pinyin (alphabetically), and second level by stroke count.
- Search characters by character components. You can either click the component of a character on the character animator, or enter a component on the search box of Search characters by components page to look up characters with the component. Again, the system allows the user to perform two-level sorting on the search results, first level by usage frequency, character structure or Pinyin(alphabetically), and second level by stroke count.
- Converts pinyin with tone number notation to pinyin with tone marks
- Animates a character stroke by stroke, one character at a time or continuously animates all the characters you have imported or studied.
- Runs on all major platforms (Windows, Linux and MacOS X) and browsers (including Internet Explorer 6.x & 7.0, Firefox 1.5, 2.x & 3.x, Safari 3.x, Google Chrome and Opera 9.x)
- Displays radicals, components, character usage frequency, character structure information, English translations, stroke counts, Pinyin and the corresponding traditional characters (if any)
- Native-speaker pronunciation of each character
- Customizable and easy-to-use user interface
- Keeps track of characters you have studied
- and more...
