Let’s start this article with the apps (or websites) about Chinese language and culture that we use the most. Then, let’s talk about websites and apps you don’t really need to visit every day but are still extremely interesting to explore and you’ll be glad to know about. We visit them from time to time, only, true, but they always impress us with their meaningful content. We are pretty sure you’ll visit some and discover great websites in this list.

Ninchanese

The Chinese learning app we’ve made. Of course, we use it every day, multiple times a day. And well, Ninchanese is a very well-rounded app. There is all you need: Chinese characters, grammar, dialogues, how to speak and write and so on. You’ll learn Chinese at your speed, step by step and with a game-like style. It’s a great way to practice your Chinese, a must-have for every learner.

iQiyi

On the web, we like spending time watching videos, and If you’re like us, then, this one’s for you. iQiyi streams Chinese videos. You’ll find crazy Chinese shows but the perfect Chinese drama. What’s great about this website? You’re seeing comments hovering over the footage. We love to read them and see how the Chinese speak IRL.

Video QQ

Video QQ is a website made by the giant Tencent. It’s a great website since the videos don’t lag even if you’re not in China. Some videos are really interesting to watch, others are just plain crazy or odd. There’s a lot to browse! It’s also a wonderful tool to discover what the Chinese like to watch and to explore the Chinese culture, especially with the selection they make each day of recently uploaded videos that had a lot of reactions!

See what’s popular each day!

Ninchanese is an incredible app for learning Chinese!

” I actually graduated from the University of Edinburgh with a MA in Chinese.
I’ve used Ninchanese daily, and it has helped me a lot!  “

 – Connor, Ninchanese User

Try Ninchanese, an award-winning method to learn Chinese today:

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Website about Chinese Web search: Baidu

The most well-known search engine in China is certainly Baidu. You’ll find every Chinese website on Baidu, something Google is not good at since it’s blocked in the middle kingdom. It’s a to discover website but it’s not really easy. You’ll often come upon websites fully in Chinese – that’s kind of the goal -, but that also makes it hard to explore for beginner and intermediate Chinese learners.

Looking for a website about Chinese Electronic commerce? AliExpress

There are quite a few huge Chinese websites for e-commerce to explore, such as 淘宝 Taobao, or JD or Alibaba. Outside of China, we recommend one we’ve used, by the really well-known group Alibaba, called AliExpress. It’s the electronic commerce center for everyone from the Alibaba BtoB electronic commerce giant. Products are sold at a generally great price on it, but beware, the time to receive your product can be long sometimes. Definitely worth exploring!

Discover the websites about Chinese Social Networks: Weibo and Wechat

We really love Weibo, it’s a Twitter-like website, with a little of Facebook rolled into it. It’s really active and once you start writing on it, you can get a massive Chinese following coming to you. It’s free and easy to enter in contact with Chinese netizens that way. You can even learn Chinese by using weibo, check our guide to getting started here.

Another great social/messaging service is Wechat. Nearly every Chinese citizen (if not all :D) have Wechat and use it for, well nearly everything, from chatting to banking to buying movie tickets and more. It can be a little bit harder to find people to speak with, than on Weibo since it’s more private, but once you’ve got some Chinese friends, it’s quite a nice way to communicate with them. One thing that’s good to know is that the Western version you can download outside of China is really light in features compared to the one they have access to in China. This is a little frustrating but well, everyone is on it so it’s always good to know about Wechat and be on it.

Fanyi Translator

Fanyi is not really a dictionary like Ninchanese dictionary, it’s much more a translator, hence its name 翻译 Fanyi (fān yì), which means to translate in Chinese. It works like Google Translate, only with better results. It’s all in Chinese, so that might be daunting and make you think it’s for experts only. Don’t let that stop you, the design is nice and clean and makes it easy to use and find your way around. It gives you lots of example sentences and definitions in Chinese and in English, so it’s a good resource to bookmark.

Radio: Rfi

Rfi is one of the best radios we’ve found to listen to Chinese speaking and music. It’s not Chinese, it’s all in Mandarin Chinese.  And, like any classic national radio, you’ll get Chinese news, weather reports and so on but you’ll also get to listen to traditional and recent Chinese music. It’s great to practice hearing Chinese, even if you don’t understand everything. Your ears get accustomed to the language and it becomes far easier to understand the different sounds of the language.

Website about Chinese grammar: Ninchanese lessons

When we started learning Chinese, years ago, only the Chinese grammar wiki was there for free, and so their nice collection of Chinese grammar lessons definitely deserves a mention. Since then, however, we’ve switched over from the Chinese grammar wiki to Ninchanese Grammar. Ninchanese Chinese grammar lessons are easy to understand and this page makes it really easy to navigate the lessons.

Ninchanese is an incredible app for learning Chinese!

” I actually graduated from the University of Edinburgh with a MA in Chinese.
I’ve used Ninchanese daily, and it has helped me a lot!  “

 – Connor, Ninchanese User

Try Ninchanese, an award-winning method to learn Chinese today:

Start Learning Now

Google Translate pop up

This tool lets you read Chinese without learning it. Or look up for any character you don’t remember well. It’s pretty comfortable and convenient but not fair for your learning. Lots of people would say google translate is bad, but we like the pop-up app from google translate if you know its limitations (it’s not great with context, for instance). Its advantage is you can hover Chinese characters and play only the sound, which we love since we can focus on hearing it. Zhongwen cloze is also another good pop-up you can install.

Free books on China – Archive

China has always been a very secret country, right? There are a lot of stories about China and set in China, There’s also a lot to discover about what China was like before, and on plenty of themes, from superstition to educational manuals and more. They also have Chinese books in multiple languages so don’t wait anymore. Want a recommendation? Look for real Chinese books of the 1930s. You’ll find pretty exciting books to explore. Believe me!

Bilinguis: Not so old books for free in Chinese? With the translation side by side?

This website is a great way to practice your Chinese reading without any pinyin. You read each page, one by one, with the translation on the side, and everything is free. There are classics from the English literature and loads more. Plus: there are also other languages if you like! If it’s too hard, use one of the extensions above, it will be very cool.

Chinese Phrasebook from us

You’ll say that this article is completely biased and we’ve just put our products all over the article. That may be true, but, what can we do if they are great?! We’ve made that app so we know why it’s great, right?! First, all the content are based on real needs, from when we went to China and user requests. Second, everything is organized illustrated, and with sound. It’s also free with no ads. It’s just perfect. So you should have a go and give us five stars. Thank you! ;D.

Photography: Historical Photographs Of China website

Wish you could have visited China in the ’60s? Yes, now you can! Thanks to the Historical Photographs Of China website, maintained by the University of Bristol. You’ll find a lot of pictures, more than 19 000 in fact, about China. There’s pictures of old China, of rural China but also plenty of city like pictures and more modern ones too. It’s great to get to see pictures of olden times, where you see people wearing the traditional “Chinese Han” style, with their long hair, drinking some tea. Like in the movie, but from real photos.

Discover Traditional Chinese art with CoMuseum

On this cool website, called China Online Museum, you can view all the paintings from great Chinese artists from date to date. We like to have a cup of tea, relax, and watch a few of them. They send us off staring into space for too long, lost in memories. Love it.

That’s all for today, and we hope you enjoyed the sites shared here. Have you used some of these sites and tools? Which one are you going to try first?

If you like them, please share the article. There are tons of websites great for learning Chinese and practicing at home. I’m sure you know some other good ones, share them with us so we can discover more great resources!

The Nincha Team

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Luckily for you, this album cover is an interesting collage of Chinese tickets and boarding passes!

The album is by 好妹妹 (Haomeimei), a Chinese band with a soft style, plenty of kid songs and cool graphics.

So what am I seeing here? Chinese tickets!

The larger ones are Chinese tickets for planes boarding passes.

The smaller ones are Chinese tickets for trains.

The blue Chinese tickets are magnetic card tickets

The pink ones, which were a lot more common but are being increasingly replaced by the blue ones, are paper tickets

To know more about train tickets, you can read this article!

Ninchanese combines addictive game mechanics, cute cats and efficient Chinese learning techniques to make learning Chinese a lot of fun! The app is now in beta so sign up now for early access to the beta! Check out our trailer and stay in touch with us on Facebook, Twitter, Google + and Weibo.

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You’ve got Deezer, Spotify, Rdio and more when you want to listen to Western music online. What about Chinese songs ? Where do you go to hear the Chinese top hits and discover new Chinese artists? Good news, there are a zillion of music sites in China. Even better news, these sites still let you listen to music for free. Most don’t even require you to sign up to listen, unless you want to save your new-found fave artists, of course. In short, it’s really easy to start improving your Chinese by listening to Chinese music!

One of the most well known music sites is surely QQ Music.

Top Chinese music #1: On QQ, Y is for 音乐

QQ Music is brought to you by Tencent, the Chinese web giant that made instant messaging and social sharing uber-popular in China through its QQ messaging service (their latest report stated they had over 700 million active users…).

Using QQ 音乐 to listen to Chinese music

Like most QQ services (QQ IM, QQ Mail….), which are known for their user-friendly qualities, QQ Music – QQ 音乐 in Chinese – is pretty straight forward and easy to use. Let’s go explore QQ 音乐 together and you’ll be listening to Chinese music in no time!

QQ Music offers a wealth of music, ranging from International hits to more confidential artists.

QQ Music’s home page lets you start listening to Chinese songs in seconds

To listen specifically to Chinese music, you have several options.

On the homepage, you can browse and pick any artist that you want to listen to. To check if he or she is Chinese and/or singing in Mandarin Chinese, simply click on the song to view its page or on the artist’s profile and see what is listed under 语言 (Yǔyán, language). If it says 国语 Guóyǔ or 华语 Huáyǔ, which both mean Chinese, you are good to go.

K-pop is great but for the purpose of this article, we’re only looking for Chinese pop!

You can also scroll down to other sections in the page, which you’ll be able to filter by language (华语, Huáyǔ, Chinese is what you’re looking for).

A few words to know to explore the homepage:

音乐: Yīnyuè = music

语言: Yǔyán = language

首页: Shǒuyè = Homepage

华语: Huáyǔ = Chinese language

国语: Guóyǔ = Chinese language (Mandarin)

Top Chinese music #2: Enjoy the Music Library

Another good option is to go to QQ’s Music Library, which highlights the most popular artists, albums and songs . Whether you’re viewing the library by artists (歌手, gēshǒu), albums(专辑 Zhuānjí) or top charts (排行榜 Páiháng bǎng), you can very easily find the Chinese-language artists and songs. Using the filters that are always on the left in the library section, select 华语, for Chinese.

The 排行榜 (Páiháng bǎng) section is a great way to see who’s trending in China right now.

For some reason, in the album part, 国语 (Mandarin) is used instead of 华语 but it’ll get you the same results.

 A few terms to help you browse the 乐库

乐库: Lè kù  = Music library

排行榜: Páiháng bǎng  = Top charts

歌手: gēshǒu = singer

专辑: Zhuānjí = album

Do you like Chinese guys, Chinese girls or both?

We’re talking about singers, of course. On QQ, you can not only select only Chinese language music, you can also choose what gender singer you want: Male, Female or Duets, take your pick!

Your options:

男歌手: Nán gēshǒu = male singer

女歌手: Nǚ gēshǒu = female singer

组合: Zǔhé = groups; duets

Get your fill of personal info!

For those of you with an extreme fan/stalker side, you’ll be glad to know singer profiles on QQMusic are full of essential information, such as how much does my favorite singer weigh? Does he or she like cosplay? Definitely, information you couldn’t live without!

We kid, we kid but reading their bios and fave occupations are also a cool way to practice your Chinese! So go ahead, be as stalker-ish as you want.

Sing along in Chinese

QQ Music is also a very useful tool to learn Chinese thanks to its lyric feature. Because you can easily view each song’s lyrics, pretty soon you’ll be singing in along in Chinese and learning Chinese without even realizing it!

To access the lyrics, simply click on a song you like. If lyrics are available, they’ll appear below the song’s information, under the category “歌词” (Gēcí lyrics):

You can also read the lyrics directly in the player, which is on the left hand side of the screen Just click on 词 (Cí – Words) to see them, like so:

The QQ Radio section has a similar read-along feature.

Top Chinese music #3: Exploring other options: Douban and Xiami

If QQ isn’t quite your fit, try exploring Douban Music and Xiami. Both also let you listen to streaming music for free and filter by location and language.

On Douban, you can even choose to listen to Chinese music from mainland China (内地 Nèidì – and 大陆 dàlù), 台湾 (táiwān Taiwan), 香港 (xiānggǎng, Hong Kong) or in 粤语 (yuèyǔ cantonese). On Xiami, you also have the option to download songs. The fee they charge per song is pretty low, too!

03/12 UPDATE: Here are a few more sites to try out! 

– Baidu (China’s Google, if not bigger) has its own music site : Iit may not be as user-friendly and visually pleasing as QQ MUsic but you’ll be sure to find what’s really trending in China right now on this site. Sure it may be on our Top Chinese music.

Now all you have left to do is explore and figure out who your favorite Chinese singers are!

Know of a good Chinese music resources we left out? Who are your favorite Chinese singers? Let us know!

Happy listening!

The Nincha Team

P.S: As a bonus, here’s one of our cheesy but favorite songs! It’s called Superman, by NESE. The chorus is super easy : 我是Superman, 你是Loser!

Ninchanese is a new platform where you’ll have a blast learning Chinese! We’re still working on it for now, so sign up to try the beta for free when we launch! Check out our trailer and stay in touch with us on Facebook, Twitter, Google + and Weibo.

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