hey guys,

just wondering if anyone knows any good resources for synonyms 近义词 & antonyms 反义词?

also while i'm at it does anyone know any good resources for idioms 成语？

thanks guys

近义词 and 繁体字: http://www.jinyici.com/
近義詞: http://www.kwuntung.net/synonym/

成语: http://cy.5156edu.com/

[修改] 近义词 and 反义词: http://www.jinyici.com/

Finding synonyms and antonyms is great, and was probably what Aaron was looking for, but it got me thinking about some of my dilemmas. I would really like a source that could help me differentiate between the synonyms. There are a lot of words with similar meanings, but none of them are exactly the same. Maybe the meanings are slightly different, or the usages. Does anyone know of a resource that explains the difference between common synonyms?

Hi Aaron,

have you tried

http://www.chinese-tools.com/chinese/chengyu/dictionary/search.html

for idioms? It works for me.

You can enter a character and get a list of idioms that include it. Seems to have a good many: 手 brings up 254 idioms, 62 of which have English translations already given.

Only downside is that it doesn't give literal character-by-character translations, but it is easy enough to cut and paste the characters into MDBG ( http://www.mdbg.net/chindict/chindict.php ) to get that as well.

Good luck.

Rachael.

Cheryl, I find a combination of a good dictionary (or four) and a teacher really helps. A Chinese-Chinese dictionary is quite useful for this sort of thing, as is paying close attention to which characters make up the separate words (and particularly if they're used in any other words). But mostly I end up asking a native to explain the feel between the two, how they're used differently...