How to Write Chinese

Arch Chinese is an online Chinese learning system crafted by Chinese teachers in the United States for Mandarin Chinese language learners at K-12 schools and universities. 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 learning system to help Chinese language learners to study Mandarin Chinese in a practical, effective and enjoyable manner.

Key features include:

• Animate 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
• Generate character writing worksheets with stroke sequences, radicals, English definitions and Pinyin in PDF format for offline handwriting practice. With one mouse click, you can generate beautiful worksheets for more than 100 characters at a time instantly. The worksheets are highly customizable. You can provide your own definitions in French, Spanish, German, or whatever language you prefer. It is great for Chinese language teachers and parents to create Mandarin teaching and learning materials.
• Create and print hardcopy Chinese character flashcards from Worksheets page or Chinese vocabulary flashcards from Flashcards page on perforated business card paper for offline study. Alternatively, you can use Printable Chinese Flashcard Maker to create customized paper flashcards. They are perfect for teachers and parents to create learning materials for young learners.

• One of the most fast, powerful and complete Chinese character, word and idiom dictionaries. Our uniquely-designed Chinese-English and English-Chinese two-way dictionary provides a variety of ways to look up Chinese characters, words and idioms. You can search by fuzzy Pinyin (Pinyin without tones), Pinyin with tone numbers, Pinyin with tone marks,Chinese Pinyin Table, Chinese character radicals, English words, English phrases, English sentences, 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 queries. For the part you are not sure, you can even simply use a wildcard in your search query. Search results are ordered by usage frequency and complexity.

• Character formation and etymology information for all the Chinese characters. For a pictophonetic character, the system indicates which component provides the sound and which component suggests the meaning.
• Offer high quality, carefully-designed example sentences that demonstrate the typical sentence patterns and the usage of common characters and words. Unlike any other dictionary, our example sentences are created, one by one, by our bi-lingual Mandarin Chinese teachers, not generated by machines!
• Studio-quality, native-speaker recordings for every example sentence in the system!. We believe, for language learning, the value of machine-generated audio is minimal to none!
• Learn Chinese characters and words by writing them with your finger on your iPad, iPhone or any other smart phones and tablets.

• Pronounce the stroke names of the Chinese characters during the stroke order animations. Click the animated Chinese character or the Next Stroke button below the animated Chinese character to hear the native-speaker pronunciation of the strokes of the character.
• Download example sentence MP3 audio files to listen to them on your portable MP3 player or phone.
• Grab Chinese characters, common words and phrases from the Chinese English dictionary to generate worksheets, Bingo cards and nicely formatted paper flashcards for offline study.
• Export your vocabulary lists to Excel or CSV files so you are not tied to our system.
• Mandarin Chinese Tone Drill tool to practice and test your knowledge of Mandarin Chinese Pinyin and tones
• 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
• With the innovative Chinese Word Worksheet Generator, you can quickly make customized Mandarin Chinese words or sentence worksheets for your classes or children.

• Our Chinese Word Detail View allows the users to view not just the breakdown of the word and the example sentences, but also same head character words, same tail character words and the words with similar pronunciations. The similar pronunciation words include the words with same syllables but different tones, such as xiao3 xue2(小学, elementary school), xiao3 xue3(小雪, light snow). Further, depending on how many similar pronunciation words available, the system intelligently identify a list of words to help users to differentiate confusing pronunciations (such as zh- vs. z-, ch- vs. c-, sh- vs. s-, -ong vs. -on, -eng vs. en and -ing vs. in). The last is the unique Words of Interest, which lists all the similiar meaning or related words available in the system.

• To support and reinforce Chinese lessons, you can quickly generate custom Bingo cards and randomized call sheets with your own Chinese characters and words. Children young and old alike can learn Chinese characters and words by playing Bingo games!

• Export character stroke sequences to JPEG or PNG images.

• Similar to the YouTube videos, the Character Animation Creator allows you to create embeddable and interactive character animations quickly. You can integrate the animations into your school or personal web pages.
• A simple and easy-to-use Chinese flashcard program to help you learn Chinese characters and words efficiently and effectively. You can use the pre-defined flashcards or create your own. With one click, you can generate word worksheets and neat paper flashcards.

• Provide 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.
• Feature Chinese Radical Table to help users look up a character easily. The table lists all the radicals for the simplified Chinese characters with English 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 radical. 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.
• Convert pinyin with tone number notation to pinyin with tone marks
• Convert pinyin to Bopomofo (also known as Zhuyin).
• Complete listings of all the basic strokes used in the modern Chinese characters.
• Character Stroke Order Basic Rules
• Type Chinese Online on your PC or tablets without installing a Chinese Input Method Editor (IME).

• Animate a character stroke by stroke, one character at a time or continuously animates all the characters you have imported or studied.
• Run on all major platforms (Windows, Mac OS X and Linux) and Android-based tablets.
• Display radicals, components, measure words, character usage frequencies, character structure information, English translations, stroke counts, Pinyin and the corresponding traditional characters (if any)
• Native-speaker pronunciations for characters, words and Pinyin syllables (including all the initials and finals).
• Look up and grab the vocabulary lists created by fellow Chinese teachers or learners.

• Fast and easy-to-use user interface
• Keep track of characters you have studied
• and more...

Many Chinese language learners and teaching professionals have found this system useful and effective. Read what some of our users and teaching professionals have said about us on the User Testimonials page. As one user said, this system literally serves as a free 24-hour-a-day tutor. Sign up now and learn Chinese characters with this 24-hour-a-day Chinese tutor today!