Learning Chinese, the 21st century way

There are a lot of great websites and [tag]free software[/tag] apps to assist in studying the [tag]Chinese[/tag] [tag]language[/tag]. Just today on Chinese-Forums I discovered ZDT, and I'm already hooked. I had been thinking about starting an open source flashcard application in PHP, but now there's really no need for that any more.

[tag]ZDT[/tag] is written in java, using the Eclipse rich client platform. This is a big plus since java is naturally cross-platform, personally I'm also quite fond of the Eclipse UI, so the look-and-feel is very familiar. It allready contains a lot of words, and it's easy to create new sets of flashcards. Obviously there are still some bugs and missing features, but at version 0.4.8 it's already a very useful program.

Another program I've used extensively while studying chinese is [tag]Stardict[/tag]. This is a dictionary program that can be used for a multitude of languages, just get the dictionary files you need from the stardict website. For instance I have Dutch-English, French-English, Chinese-English, German-English and some other interesting ones installed. A cool feature is the 'scan' mode, just select any word in your browser, wordprocessor or any other app and watch a pop-up appear with all the translations available.

In other free sofware news : the new [tag]Ubuntu[/tag] Linux distribution, Dapper Drake is nearing completion. First release is scheduled for the first of june. If I find the time during my exams I'll write a review of Kubuntu, the KDE variant.