Using Chinese on Your Computer

The browser does make a difference in reading and writing Chinese on the Internet. Generally speaking, Internet Explorer does a better job than Netscape in displaying and processing Chinese.

Click to find instructions on doing Word Processing in Chinese as well as in other Asian languages, such as Japanese and Korean.

Would you like to learn how to read and send Emails in Chinese and other Asian langauges? If you can write Chinese (or Japanese, or Korean) on the computer, wouldn't it be fun to chat in one of these languages on the Internet? Open this page to go to the CHAT ROOMS.

If you would like to read and write Chinese on your home computer, but don't feel like wiping out your English installation in favor of a Chinese equivalent, you have a few options.

Macintosh OS 9 users can try going here, http://www.apple.com/macos/start/wnlng.htm, and check out what the site has to say. From the quick glance we took, it looks like there is a Custom Install option within the Mac OS Installer that allows one to put a Language Kit into play. Hopefully the process is really as straightforward as it sounds.
Windows 95, 98, ME and NT4.0 users have a little more reading and fiddling to do ahead of them. Check out this site, http://www.microsoft.com/Windows/ie/Features/ime.asp, to get all of the gritty details. In general, the site guides you through obtaining the Global IME from Microsoft and tweaking a few programs after the installation is complete.
Windows 2000 touts itself as the OS of choice for offices that need to operate in multiple languages. If you don't already own it, but feel daring enough to subject your system to the Win2K experience, there will be options during the install that allow you to install support for Chinese. If you already have Win2K installed, it also should be possible to add the Chinese IME. The Microsoft Knowledge Base has a page that suggests one method for adding support of Chinese. Although the title of the article is "HOWTO: Add and Enable Additional Languages in Windows NT," the opening lines of the file state that it also applies to all flavors of Windows 2000. Go to www.microsoft.com and, click on the "support" menu, chose "knowledge base," click the radio button for "Specific article ID number" and type in Q177561 in the "My question is..." box.)

There are certainly other solutions out there, but for now, hopefully these few will get started anyone that wants to wander down the computerized Chinese path.

Once your computer has the ability to read Chinese, there are a few sites in the Useful Links page you might like to check out. Here are a few to get you off the ground:

Go to http://tyao.lll.hawaii.edu/icusers This site offers very useful supplementary instructional materials for our first and second year courses. Go to Menu for Students and you will see demonstrations of the stroke orders and hear the pronunciation of all the new characters in every lesson of Level One, Part One and Part Two. It also has various exercises for most of the lessons in Integrated Chinese.
University of Minnesota's CLA Language Center web site, http://LanguageCenter.cla.umn.edu has links to many different sites for instructions of various languages. You can also click here to go directly to the CLA Language Center's Chinese site: http://languagecenter.cla.umn.edu/lc/surfing/chinese.html. This site will link you to many sites related to Chinese, including the language, Chinese society, and culture.
Another website, dedicated to the Chinese language and culture, is http://www.zhongwen.com. Be sure to visit it and you will certainly discover lots of treasure.
If you can already read Chinese, you might want to visit some websites launched in China. You can find lots of them. Go to http://www.netease.com, you will find news, sports, popular music, society, finance, travel, education opportunities, health, culture, and almost everything about China. You can also find large amount of information in all the above categories in http://www.sina.com and http://www.sohu.com.
There are also many Chinese E-magizines on the Internet. Go to http://www.cnd.org/HXWZ/, or http://www.cnd.org/HXWZExpress. Based in the United States, and launched by Chinese students and scholars from China, this magazine is the most popular one among overseas Chinese.
The Chinese people in Minnesota has a very popular website. Please go to visit it at http://www.minhua.com. You will find News, Forums, Minnesota China Academy, and much, much more.
The Maple Garden magazine, http://www.fhy.net is based in Canada, and is also very popular among overseas Chinese.