You will find a lot of most common Mandarin Chinese vocabularies by categories with audio pronunciations on the Web. Each vocabulary has a picture and pronunciation to match with to help you distinguish and remember.
Find more at : Mandarin vocabulary
For all those who are working on Chinese advanced level and want to learn how to recognize and write the character. Here are some very good transcriptions in simplified and traditional Chinese to help you master your Chinese writing skills. The first part teaches how to read and recognize Chinese characters from simple to difficult in short articles. The second part teaches how to write Chinese character stroke by stroke. It both has simplified and traditional version. Files are in Pdf. Download here: Chinese Character
Totally free English<->Chinese dictionary. The definitions are very good and there is an audio file for the pronunciation. You can search in Chinese or English, in pinyin or in character. Uniquely you can also search by drawing a character.
This ability to handwrite characters directly on the website is the best feature. This feature is a bit hard to use but it is fantastic and the system will offer you some choices based from your drawing. So even if you don’t know the Pinyin of a character you still can have a translation.
You can also search conversations by place and by topic. There are also good example and idioms. Build your vocabulary from “Theme of the day” or “Theme category”.
This is a really good Chinese-English online dictionary , take a look at: nciku.com
