I have recently developed a free Chinese learning site call ecChinese.com The site is developed in 21 languages who want to know some basic Chinese before taking serious paid course. It contains listening, oral, characters writing. Easy to learn.
I think I cannot post the link here, otherwise it will take it as spam. Please visit ecChinese (add dot com after ecChinese).
Enjoy!
Catherine.
Last month I showed that the Oneaday.org website has an Atom feed, and that has enabled me to create a sidebar of links to each idiom as they are published. You can syndicate the content if you have a little bit of PHP knowledge and can download the Magpie RSS - PHP library (make sure you get at least version 0.7 which features some strong work by Steve Minutillo to get Chinese character encoding working) and install it. Don't worry, you only need to know how to uncompress it and upload it to your web site's server.
<?php
define('MAGPIE_OUTPUT_ENCODING', 'UTF-8');
include "path/to/magpie/rss_fetch.inc";
// change 'path/to/magpie' to wherever you've uploaded the Magpie RSS PHP script
$maxidioms = 10; // change this number to suit your needs
$idiom_feed = fetch_rss ("http://www.oneaday.org/index.xml");
$idioms = array_slice($idiom_feed->items, 0, $maxidioms);
foreach ($idioms as $idiom) {
print '<li>';
print '<a href="';
print $idiom['link'];
print '">';
print $idiom['title'];
print '</a>';
if (isset($idiom['description'])) {
$description = str_replace("(", " (", $idiom['description']);
$description = str_replace("...", "", $description);
// the above two lines clean up the display a little bit
print ': ';
print $description;
}
print '</li>';
print "\n";}
?>
</ul>
I should point out that this is not how I link to the Chinese idioms on the sidebar of Watching China. Instead I use the RSS aggregator that comes with Drupal (hosted by, Bryght. This does not require PHP knowledge or the download of a script. Instructions on how to do that are forthcoming.
