In case anyone is interested in the previous discussion about different ways to write 過, I came across this Wikipedia article on how some characters have multiple valid forms - it includes the variants of 骨 and 為, which are written differently in different places:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variant_Chinese_character

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Taiwan's Ministry of Education has published a number of school-based videos, most with Chinese subtitles and explanations in Chinese, which are really great listening practice. The videos are primarily dialogue between kids, so they're easy to understand:

http://epaper.edu.tw/e9617_epaper/vlog_list.aspx?type=0

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Another site is this interesting dictionary, which contains, among other things, number slang dating 12 years back (things like 520 to mean 我愛你):

http://www.edu.tw/files/site_content/M0001/newtsz2/newyul.html

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On the Go Chinese is a good place for mining basic sentences/questions (click "Digital Textbook" and you can see topics and download Word docs with short dialogues)

http://www.onthegochinese.com/

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Taiwan Panorama magazine has a list of vocab featured in its stories:

http://www.taiwan-panorama.com/wordpage.php


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For more advanced learners, if you're trying to learn medical words, a cool site is Taiwan's "online medical school", where you'll find gems like this:

http://fms.cto.doh.gov.tw/DOH/Broadcast/LMSMain.jsp?classId=9&courseId=26&type=choice

The main page is here, where you can choose your ailment: http://fms.cto.doh.gov.tw/index.html



*** Note: most of these sites are in traditional only, but you can easily change any text to simplified as needed with a browser add-on (i.e. Firefox's "Gb2Big")

Hope these are useful to someone!

3Q! 07734 FTW