Discover new Chinese sites

Google and Chinese search engines

Google, as we mentioned, was banned from mainland China. Google.cn is now only a picture of Google in Chinese, that redirects to the Google Hong Kong site. The following two sites are well known Chinese search engines you can turn to.

百度, Baidu 

Baidu is China’s reigning search engine. It’s also much much more. Expect to find Baidu everywhere, from a search engine, obviously, to OS and phone provider, to online Wikipedia, thanks to its 57 services. Baidu is opening a Silicon Valley lab to work on R&D and rumor has it that Baidu Eye is on its way. Sound like Google much?

有道, Youdao

This popular alternative is Baidu’s Bing in a way. Youdao offers a range of services, including an exploration-worthy dictionary and translation service, which provides nice, current, English-Chinese sample sentences taken from the web.

Understanding social media in China

In a similar fashion to Google, Facebook, Twitter and Google Plus were locked out of China’s Great Firewall. You, therefore, need to turn to Chinese sites and social media to get your fill of socialities. Fret not, there’s plenty to choose from. In fact, 8 Chinese social brands were on the Most Valuable Social Media Brands list in 2012. Here are a few things to know.

A social war between two giants

Unlike in the US, where the roles are pretty clear-cut, in China, the hustle isn’t over yet. Two giants, Sina and Tencent are waging a war against each other to rule China’s social world.

Sina vs. Tencent in short

Basically (although that’s really simplifying things), Tencent rules the instant messaging world and social login with QQ. With over a billion registered users, QQ login is as omnipresent in China as Facebook connect is over here. Some apps and sites are pretty much QQ-member only.

On the other side, Sina rules the micro-blogging world with its uber-popular micro-blogging site Weibo (微博). (Tencent also has its own Weibo though, to make things more confusing.)

Sina Weibo has often been compared to Twitter but it’s a lot more than that. One of the first things you notice on this site is how incredibly active it is. It’s also (therefore?) a great way to learn Chinese.

Who’s Facebook in China?

Renren -人人网 – the dominant player?

When it comes to being the Chinese answer to Facebook, things are less clearcut. Renren is often said to be China’s Facebook with 170 million registered users and 45 million active users.

Truth is, while none of the others look as much like Facebook as Renren, sites like Kaixin001, Douban, Pengyou (Tencent) and QZone (Tencent) are also strong Chinese social network contenders. QZone, the oldest social media of the lot was even named QZone is China’s most valuable social media brand China’s most valuable social media brand in 2012.

Giants and new players

Some observers, however, base their comparisons on users rather than features and prefer likening Tencent QQ’s billion users to Facebook’s user base. Others see Sina Weibo as China’s answer to both Facebook and Twitter. But that’s not it. The third type of players, mobile chatting apps  – smartphone users are on the serious rise – have also decisively entered the playing field.

Chat apps like WeChat (Tencent) are already at 200 million users (including me) in two years and their userbase has spread all over the world, scaring even possibly the likes of Facebook. So who knows what the social media scene in China will look like in a few years.

There’s a lot more to be said about China’s social media sites and guessed about China’s future digital landscape. In the meantime, nothing beats trying these sites on your own to form your own opinion.

So prepare yourself to experience visually different sites, full of pop-ups and Chinese and give Chinese sites a try! If you want to start easy, Hootsuite has recently started offering both Tencent and Sina Weibo and Renren integration in its social management suite. Surround App also lets you enter the Weibo world, sans Chinese. And if you’re going in full-Chinese mode, the Zhongwen Cloze browser add-on is a good travel companion, as it instantly translates any word you don’t know.

Happy exploring! Let us know how it was!

The Nincha Team

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——- Credit:

Chinese Digital Landscape infographic by digital jungle.

The post Chinese sites: Discover China’s digital landscape appeared first on Ninchanese.

Besides, Weibo is a fascinating source of information from the people living and shaping, China. This also makes it a great way to learn Chinese, straight from the source. Read on to get onboard and learn our favorite ways to effectively learn Chinese on Weibo!

First, let’s create an account on Weibo. Ready for this Weibo account creation step-by-step tutorial?

First step: Create an account on Weibo

Take it cool for this first step. It’s quite easy.

Press the big green button

Go to http://weibo.com and click on the big green button that will get you on China’s number one social network. Pretty soon, Weibo will become your best micro-blogging website!

Good job! Next up is the sign-up screen and that is where things start getting hairy. If you’re not fluent in Chinese.

Getting the right sign-up form

As you can see (from the icon on the left) ,this sign-up form is for mobiles. Chinese mobiles. So, if you’re not living in China but still want to use Weibo (and we really recommend you do!), you have to switch to the email-based sign up form. See the first mandatory field? It says: 手机号码 [ shǒujī hàomǎ]. Here, you’re supposed to enter your phone number. If you don’t have a Chinese mobile phone number, the line below’s for you. It says: 没有手机？[Méi yǒu shǒujī? = don’t have a cell phone?] and gives you the option to go on using your email instead : 用邮箱注册 [yòng yóuxiāng zhùcè] Click on this. It’ll load a new sign up form, which looks like this:

Yay ! There’s a little “mail” icon now instead of a phone!

Time to fill in the form!

Here’s your translation cheat code to kill that “form”boss:

You’re (almost) in!

Yep, you did it. That wasn’t so difficult, was it?   Great job so far. One last step, and you’ll be ready to go to your interface to browse, interact and chat. In Chinese. First, just for fun, let’s see what that big sentence in orange meant:

The sentence was: 马上激活邮件，完成注册吧！ Mǎshàng jīhuó yóujiàn, wánchéng zhùcè ba ! 马上 : mǎshàng = at once, immediately 激活 : jīhuó = to activate 邮件 : yóujiàn = email 完成 : wánchéng = complete 注册 : zhùcè = to register 吧 : ba = interjection

Ok, so, this says: once you click on the activation link you received by email, your registration will be complete. Oops, a wild boss appeared ;). To go to your email, click the big yellow button. Got the email, clicked on the link? Congratulations, you are now officially on Weibo, China’s number one micro-blogging community. Pretty soon, you’ll discover just how incredibly active this community of Chinese-speakers is and your Chinese speaking skills will take off in no time!

You’re in! Just tell us about yourself first

First things first, though. It’s time to talk a bit about yourself. See, I choose shanghaiparisny as my Nickname. It’s just a test account for this tutorial though, so if you’d like to follow me on Weibo, look for Ninchanese ;).

If you already know some Chinese, you will probably recognise some of the terms usually used to introduce yourself. These terms are pretty standard registration form vocabulary, so they’ll also come in in the future. Let’s fill the hell out of this form! Upload your picture first. Done with that? Good. Here’s some vocab to help with the rest:

Fill in all the mandatory fields.  On the side of each field, you’ll be asked to select how visible you want this information to be. Choose from:

• 所有人可见:  suǒyǒu rén kějiàn ＝ everyone
• 我关注的人可见： wǒ guān zhùderén kějiàn ＝ you’re concerned about who sees this = only those you approve
• 仅自己可见 : jǐn zìjǐ kějiàn = only you

To continue, click on the yellow arrow. The one that says 下一步 [xiàyībù], which means…next step.

Let Weibo get to know you

This is step 2 out of 3 – almost done!. In this step, Weibo would like to know you a bit better. All you have to do is choose a few of your interests, at least one. Choose whatever you like, the pictures are pretty self-explanatory.

Click on that big button one last time… And that’s it. You’re on Weibo !

There’s a lot more to discover on Weibo, but this is already a good start. Enjoy your time on Weibo! And be sure to lookfor us! Our nickname is Ninchanese

The Nincha Team!

title photo credit: bfishadow via photopin

Ninchanese is a great new app where you’ll have fun learning Chinese. We’re still working on it, so sign up to be invited to the beta when we launch! And stay in touch with us on Facebook, Twitter, Google + and Weibo. 

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