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East Asian Studies

Searching for Chinese language resources

 

The video above provides an excellent foundational understanding of how to search for Chinese language resources effectively. 

Searching with Chinese characters is a good starting point if you are unfamiliar with Library of Congress (LC) romanization rules (i.e., Pinyin) or you are searching for a known title. However, generally, searching the UAL Catalogue with pinyin remains the most effective way to find Chinese-language material.

For a complete list of pinyin romanization rules, please see the resources linked below. Please keep in mind the following general rules:

  • Generally, individual syllables are romanized separately, except for personal names, geographic location, and certain proper nouns which are written together. 
  • For Chinese personal names, the family name separate from the given name.
    • E.g., "李白" as "Li Bai"
  • For geographical names, join the syllables associated with multi-character geographic names.Separate the names of jurisdictions and topographical features from the geographical names.
    • E.g., "海南岛" as "Hainan Dao"

For a more comprehensive search, consider using a combination of:

  • Pinyin (without the tones)
  • Wade-Giles (without the tones)
  • Chinese characters

Search tools (catalogues & databases) may search for original language and/or transliteration and/or translations. The results depend on what information (metadata) exists for each item. The UAL Catalogue can generally map simplified to traditional characters, and vice-versa. While there are specific rules regarding spacing in pinyin and Wade-Giles, consider trying variations in how you join characters as records may contain different information.

  • E.g., “道德经” OR “道德經” OR “daode jing” OR “dao de jing” OR “daodejing” OR “tao te ching” OR “taoteching”

 

Additional resources:

English Language Databases and Collections

NOTE: See "EASIA general resources" tab for other interdisciplinary sources with China/Chinese content.

Chinese Language Databases

Open Books Hong Kong Pilot Project

A collection of nine Chinese books published by three university presses, covering history, philosophy, religion, law, anthropology, gender studies and other fields of humanities and social sciences. 

More will be added in the coming months. 

Newspapers

English newspaper databases with Chinese content: 

China-specific or in Chinese

Learning Mandarin - Online Resources

Gateway to Chinese Grammar Lessons
Compiled by University of Texas

Arch Chinese
A Chinese learning system crafted by Chinese teachers in the United States for Mandarin Chinese language learners at K-12 schools and universities

 Learn Chinese with Litao
Litao Chinese is a Youtube channel that specializes in teaching Mandarin Chinese as a foreign language. Our mission is to provide learnable, systematic and high-quality online Chinese courses

 Yellowbridge
An online Chinese-English and English-Chinese dictionary

Course Era - Chinese for Beginners
An ABC Chinese course for beginners from Peking University. It provides an introduction to Mandarin phonetics and essential daily expressions, enabling learners to achieve a fundamental understanding and confidently engage in basic conversations.

Learning Cantonese - Online Resources

Omniglot - Cantonese
An online language encyclopedia that includes history of the Cantonese language, written characters and Romanized script, phrases and numbers.

Learn Cantonese!
Contains information for learning colloquial Cantonese (Yue Chinese) as it is spoken by today's youth in Hong Kong and in overseas communities such as Canada, the United States and Australia.

Jyutping Cantonese Romanisation Scheme
Jyutping is a new Cantonese romanization system which has many advantages. It is multifunctional, systematic, user-friendly, compatible with all possible modern Cantonese sounds, and solely based on alphanumeric characters without any diacritics and strange symbols.

Cantonese (Toishan) Basic Course
A course written by Aaron from the Four Counties Blog. The lessons include tones and vowels, consonants, adverbs and much more

Taishanese/Toisanese Online Word Dictionary
A Taishanese online word dictionary with audio

Learn Cantonese - Story Learning
Contains a guide for absolute beginners

 

Subject Librarian

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Cheng Yin Zhu
I use any pronouns (he/she/they)

Chinese dictionaries and encyclopedias

This reading list contains select print and online dictionaries and encyclopdias covering topics such as art, history, vernacular characters, and biographies.

Consulting dictionaries and encyclopedias can help you get started in your research, grounding you in concepts, definitions, and keywords that are relevant to your topic. 

Current Chinese journals in print (interlibrary loan)

Canadian universities with a Chinese collection have compiled a list of their currently subscribed Chinese journals (print). This is a project by the Council on East Asian Libraries' Committee on Chinese Materials to facilitate scholars' interlibrary loan requests.