Welcome, and indeed 14911欢迎huān yíng/to welcome/welcome/ ​, to startchinese.com, the site dedicated to learning Chinese for the beginner and novice. Here, you will find useful tools such as the Pinyin converter, Chinese dictionary, and numerous other learning resources. This site is intended for those interested in learning 26110普通话pǔ tōng huà/Mandarin (common language)/Putonghua (common speech of the Chinese language)/ ​, using Hanyu Pinyin, or simplified Chinese characters.

Can't see the 13588汉字Hàn zì/Chinese character, kanji/ ​? Then you'll need to install Chinese text support in your operating system. If you can see the Chinese, then hover your mouse over the characters to see the hanyu-pinyin representation, and an English translation (requires Javascript).

Please do take the time to register. Once registered, you'll be able to save your favourite Chinese words and comment on the sites' articles and words in the dictionary. There's exciting new features coming soon, exclusively for our registered users!

News

23rd March 2010 - startchinese.com is born

After using Fozza.com as a domain name for Chinese learning resources since 2002, I have finally decided to use something a bit more relevant. From now on, Fozza.com is startchinese.com, a much more fitting name I hope you'll agree. At the moment a redirect is in place to nicely bounce you to the new domain, but please remember to update any of your bookmarks.

I have also used the opportunity to put the site on a shiny new, faster private server as well. Hopefully you'll see better response times with the site, especially if you are based in the UK.

4th September 2008

Some dictionary improvements today. When you view a dictionary word's "full entry", you can now see both the traditional and simplified characters together. You can also search using traditional Chinese (but the results list will still be simplified characters at the moment). I've also improved the search queries so the language is now auto-detected, no need to choose before you search. Hooray!

2nd September 2008

Two new learning pages today: an addition to the numbers section, Chinese dates which explains how months, years and days are represented in Chinese. I've also added a quick guide to Chinese greetings and farewells - essential if you are meeting any Chinese people any time soon!

31st August 2008

startchinese.com now has flash cards! When you are in your My Zhongwen page, or browsing another user's public profile, you'll now see a flash cards link in the right-hand menu. Using this link, you can see the user's word collection as a series of flash cards, which will hopefully help you learn the words easily.

28th August 2008

Two more pages: a beginners guide to the Chinese tones and a Hanyu Pinyin pronunciation guide. Hopefully these will help beginners get started and get the most out of the site.

26th August 2008

Added two new pages: Chinese numbers 10-99, following on from my basic numbers guide. I've also added a well-known number tongue twister that will really test your tone pronunciation!

25th August 2008

The new startchinese.com has gone live! I've been busy rewriting my site with my new web system that gives me much more flexibility than my old Wordpress-based one. The dictionary has been given a facelift, and now shows you tone marks on Pinyin. The pinyin character converter now creates correct Pinyin - thanks to those who pointed out the previous version was wrong.

Most importantly, on the new site, you can now click any Chinese word and see an instant translation. You can also add it to your own personalised My Zhongwen database, which maintains a list of words you want to learn.