Note: On occasion some of these sites may be unreachable, especially during peak usage periods. If this occurs, please try again later.

There are very lively Chinese-language newsgroups on Usenet, each containing the same information, but in different Chinese encodings:

• Big5, alt.chinese.text.big5

• Hz, alt.chinese.text

This is a great place for the learner to practice casual Chinese.

There are a number of Chinese Web sites. To read their contents, you will need to deal with the Chinese character encodings. There are various ways to do this, depending on your platform, only one of which we will describe here: If you are running Unix and X11 windows, then from within a cxterm/kxterm window use lynx as your Web browser; from a PC, start up ZWDOS or KC before getting on to the Web.

Here, then are some Web sites:

There is an excellent weekly Chinese electronic magazine, Hua Xia Wen Zhai. You can read the back issues via the Web. You can also "subscribe," with issues e-mailed to you each week; see instructions at the end of any back issue.

Classic Chinese poetry, novels and so on.