To those newbies who have been studying Chinese for only a few years, some of the hoops we old-timers had to jump through must seem rather ridiculous. If a mention of Shimisi and his messy roommate brings a nostalgic smile to your lips, you must have worked on your dialogues with the aid of Modern Chinese Beginner’s Course, virtually the only textbook to provide Chinese learning material to English speakers until a few years ago when the market started flooding with alternatives.



Worse even than the staid situations between those pages was the prospect of looking a character up in a dictionary “by hand.” Those of you who use computers to study Chinese (ie. the sensible ones) may not even know how that’s done. First you have to identify the character’s relevant radical and successfully count the number of strokes. Then use that information to look the blighter up on a long chart. If that sounds like a monumental pain in the buttocks, it’s because it is. Nowadays? Use nciku.com’s near-magical handwriting recognition feature or, if you’re reading in digital, simply copy and paste the character into an online dictionary in seconds.



Along with Nciku and Chinese Pod, I’ve recently added Weibo to my online-learning arsenal and frankly I can’t believe I didn’t sign up earlier.



The strength of the whole microblog concept is in its limitation: posts cannot be longer than 140 characters and generally are far shorter. If the sight of a hefty textbook’s “wall ‘o characters” gives you a headache, Weibo is an absolute godsend.



Secondly, though perhaps I should have mentioned this first, the peculiar vanity of Chinese girls to plaster their photographs over everything means the hormone-driven male can “follow” dozens of users with cute profile pictures to ensure he has the prettiest teachers in town. I would never do that of course - I follow a few men so as to appear less blatant.



Once you’re keeping an eye on a choice selection of microbloggers, you’ll have a screen-full of new Chinese chatter to read through every day. Unknown characters can be pasted into Nciku for translation and, if you register, added to a word-list for revision at a later date. Of course, some of the users you follow will follow you back, providing the motivation to start composing your own micro-masterpieces. I say that, but because this is the blogosphere your writings don’t exactly have to be earth-shattering. Just drunk a nice cup of tea? Good enough.



The biggest hurdle is probably Weibo bloggers’ ubiquitous use of Internet slang, however, much of which has yet to make it into dictionaries. As good a primer as any is Niubi: The Real Chinese You Were Never Taught In School, a book that offers a whole chapter dedicated to Internet slang, taking you through netizens’ obsession with homophones, current-affair catchphrases and Roman-alphabet letters.



Another option is chinasmack.com, which translates hot stories and comments from around the Chinese Internet into English with the original characters just a mouse roll-over away. Be warned however, the content tends to be quite hair-raising so prepare yourself for something a bit more racy than Shimishi politely disagreeing with his roommate about which Chinese snacks are the most delicious.

