Play Games. Learn Chinese.
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Learn Pinyin and Chinese characters with fun mini-games that have been proven effective by teachers around the world!

Neat, illustrated and colorful flashcards with English, Pinyin, and 2 different styles of Chinese characters.

Character-based online flashcards are color-coded for the 4 tones in Mandarin. Image-based flashcards are a quick way to memorize Chinese.

Beginner ebooks show word-for-word Pinyin and English. More advanced Chinese texts include annotations and selected Pinyin / translation.

Learn useful Chinese words with our basic to advanced Chinese vocabulary lists by subjects and read-along vocabulary guides.

Read Chinese with the Harry Potter books! Get FREE extracts from the Chinese edition and FREE vocabulary guides to follow along.

Visually memorize complex Chinese characters or words with wallpapers! Choose your format: desktop, mobile, or tablet.

Let your kids learn simple Chinese with coloring pages, spot-the-difference games, and pair-off games!

Visit our bookstore for reference books, dictionaries, novels, comic books, children's books, all for learning Chinese!

Mandarin

Unless otherwise stated, Chinese is understood as Mandarin Chinese throughout the website.

Cantonese which is a major Chinese dialect spoken around the world will be added later to our program.

Simplified Characters

The Chinese characters we feature are the simplified characters officially used in China.

Traditional characters can nonetheless be learned with some of our flashcards, games, and ebooks.

Pinyin

We use Pinyin to represent the standard pronunciation of Mandarin in all of our content.

Jyutping is used as the notation system for Cantonese. Read more...

The Chinese Languages

Chinese is a group of related but quite different language varieties.

The varieties of Chinese are usually described as dialects for political reasons but they are linguistically as diverse and different as languages.

For example, somebody from Beijing where people speak Beijing Mandarin would have a hard time understanding somebody from Hong Kong where people speak Cantonese .

Mutual Understanding

There are between 7 and 13 main regional groups of Chinese.

Most of them share common terms and some degree of intelligibility or understanding.

A person speaking only Cantonese can still find out what a person from Beijing wants to say, just by following a set of conversion patterns.

For example, most characters pronounced bian in Beijing are converted into bin in Cantonese.

Mandarin is a Standard

Why is Mandarin always presented as the official Chinese language?

Mandarin or Standard Chinese (also called Putonghua, Guoyu, or Huayu) is the standardized form of the Beijing dialect.

Mandarin is the official language of China and Taiwan, as well as one of the four official languages of Singapore. It is also one of the six official languages of the United Nations. This position on the international scene makes it look like a run-of-the-mill language.

Transcriptions of Chinese

Pinyin is the phonetics developed in the 1950s by Mainland China for transliterating Chinese characters into the Roman alphabet.

Pinyin is not the only transcription system for Chinese. Other systems such as Zhuyin or Bopomofo, the Yale Romanization or the Wade-Giles, which was the system in use in the English-speaking world for most of the 20th century, are also valid and commonly known notation systems.

Simplified and Traditional Chinese Characters

Two Chinese writing systems are in place. Simplified characters are officially used in Mainland China, Singapore, and the United Nations. Traditional Chinese characters are used in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and in the overseas Chinese communities around the world.

To learn more on Chinese traditional characters, Chinese simplified characters, pinyin and other Chinese languages, see the Chinese language courses at our Member website LittleNex.com