Hi, I've been using Skritter for a while for Japanese, and i think it's great, it's helped me a lot.

I recently (and by recently, i mean yesterday) started learning Chinese and was just wondering a few things.

Things like, how soon should i start learning Hanzi, what is the best way to learn to understand Pinyin (since from what i have seen of it so far, you read the are really different from what i would expect).

Also, do you know any good online dictionaries. I use nihongodict for Japanese, so something like that would be fantastic.

Thanks :)

Hey RyuuguuAzuma (now that's a username!), I'm not an expert by any means (我只是二年级得学生), and I'm sure many of the other users here can help you more than I, but to answer some of the basic questions:

The way that I've found works best for me is to learn the hanzi using mnemonics based on the character radicals. Remembering the Hanzi is a hard core reading-oriented method for learning quickly and is a great way to accelerate character learning if you're in it for the long haul.

The pinyin is something you should use only as a crutch (so sayeth my 老师), and if you can, you should move away from it as soon as possible. In terms of learning the pronunciation, the way I learned way just listening to my teachers.

In terms of dictionary sites, there's MDBG, Nciku, Arch Chinese, eStroke, DictCN, Zhongwen.com, and those are the just biggest and most well-known. I personally like Wenlin a lot, but it's not free and it's not online.

Like I said, I'm only a second year, so I imagine others can help you more than I! Another resource you can always try is ChineseForums. I imagine they have some really comprehensive threads that would answer your questions.

I definitely want to learn hanzi, it's one of the things that drew me to the language in the first place (that and it all just sounds so good to the ear when you hear it).

Speaking of which, the Japanese name i made for myself uses these kanji for the Ryuuguu part: 竜宮

How would you pronounce this in Chinese?

You can look up the pronunciation of Chinese characters in nciku, mdbg, zhongwen, yellowbridge, etc. There's an old forum thread with lots of recommendations for dictionaries.

MDBG says 竜 is pronounced "long2" and 宮 is pronounced "gong1".

http://us.mdbg.net

James

I stopped learning Japanese a while ago but I remember my teacher saying that the double "uu" or "oo" has now been replaced by û and ô (Ryûgû), is my memory failing ?

竜 actually don't exist in chinese, it's a japanese variant of 龍 (Dragon) which is pronounced, as jww1066 said, "Long2" and 宮 is pronounced "gong1" (Palace/Temple).

which, since you said you don't know pinyin yet, doesn't sound like the words long or gong :) More like how they would be pronounced if you changed the short 'o' sound to long 'o'