About this site

What's it all about?

startchinese.com started as a personal homepage for Dan Forys back in 2001. It's been through various guises over time, but has increasingly focused on tools for learning Chinese. The latest design was completed in August 2008, giving it a contemporary oriental feel.

How do I use it?

The site is designed around making it as easy as possible for new and novice Chinese learners. Almost any Chinese word on the site will pop up a translation if you hover over it with your mouse. If you register and log-in, you'll be able to click the words and add them to your own "My Zhongwen" word collection. You can also opt to have a public profile where you can show others which words you are learning.

We hope to build a community of Chinese learners, where we can all learn from each other and add to the dictionary and articles on the site.

What flavour of Chinese do you use?

For simplicity's sake, this site only focuses on the Mandarin language 26110普通话pǔ tōng huà/Mandarin (common language)/Putonghua (common speech of the Chinese language)/ ​, which the official language of mainland China. We represent the characters using Simplified Chinese and Hanyu Pinyin Romanisation.

Technical details

The site is built using a custom MVC templating system written in PHP. The site templates work using our HanziMatic technology, which can automatically find Chinese words in text, and translate them for the user.

The entire system has been in development for about a year and was finally completed and launched to the public on Monday 25th August 2008.

Dan occasionally blogs about his experiences with PHP and the web over at his other site.