Learn Chinese online

 So you've decided to try and save money by tying to learn Chinese online. I hate to break it to you but learning online still comes at a cost. Sure there are a lot of website out there which will provide you with free learning materials and some flashcards, but  a lot of them will make you pay a month or a yearly subscription in order to utilise all their tools.

Because most website focus on mainland Chinese and simplified characters. I've decided to tell you about the ones I've found so far that can be useful for when you live in Taiwan.

www.chinese-course.com
You can also upgrade for sound which I do believe is worth the money. This site is good for learning vocab words, but it's not very good for grammar. You can set it to auto load the page every few seconds, so you can sit back and watch the words whiz past.

http://quizlet.com/
A great flashcard system. It allows you to create your own flashcards, or use ones already made by other people. It also comes with a few word learning games. The great thing about this one is that is also comes with sounds if you're more of an audio learner like me. You can also print out your flashcards for self study.

MP3 learning.

http://www.chineselearnonline.com
I used this one for a while, and it was good because it explains each grammar point and a lot of vocab in English, so mandarin did begin to make more sense. But I didn't really learn much just by listening, it only helped to re-enforce the grammar I already knew. Maybe you have to buy a subscription and utilise the other materials to really take it all in.

http://chinesepod.com/
This is quite a popular one, but I'm not a big fan. I found that it spent more time analysing and talking about the grammar in English than the actual Chinese spoken. And the speaker's English speaking accents irritated me a little.

http://www.mdbg.net/chindict/chindict.php
Good online Chinese Dictionary

www.nciku.com/
My favourite Online Chinese dictionary, unfortunately it's only simplified.

Of course there are still a few other options, such as illegally download Chinese learning software such as Rosetta stone. Some of my co-workers are really into this one, but as popular as it is I find repeatably clicking on pictures a little dull. I think I played around with this program too much as a child, so now I'm over it. Most of the accents are also from Mainland china, and can differ from what you hear in Taiwan. I remember that when I first came to Taiwan I was accustomed to mainland accents, so it took me a while to understand what anyone was saying to me.