Formosa Hut Tools

Tools for learning and using Chinese

This page provides links to on-line and downloadable tools you can use in your Chinese and English study.

Future links will probably be posted first on the wiki before appearing here.

Tools hosted at Formosahut.com

General dictionary - A general purpose dictionary
Dictionary for written input - Useful if you have to look up a Chinese word that you don't know how to pronounce
Hanzi input - A java applet for entering Chinese with your mouse or digital pen

The tools for written input can also be downloaded for use on your own computer at http://www.kiang.org/.

Firefox addons

Firefox is an excellent browser, expecially for language learners. One reason it's so good is that there are many useful addons. Below are our favorites.

Chinese Perapera-kun
This is a fabulous popup translator for web pages. Simply move your cursor over a word and a translation appears. If you're using Firefox 3.5 or later, you may need to install the most recent version, which can be found at http://perapera.wordpress.com/perapera-kun/.
New Tong Wen Tang
This addon allows you to automatically convert any web page in simplified characters to traditional, and visa versa.
Fireinput
This is a Chinese editor that allows you to input Chinese in web forms. It comes with a very cool web based editor that allows you to write and edit Chinese. For the newest version that is compatible with all versions of Firefox, go to http://www.fireinput.com/main.php.

Standalone apps

DimSum is an excellent application written in java. That page also includes links to a number of other applications, but DimSum will probably meet most of your needs.