The Chinese language uses characters (called Hanzi) rather than letters. There are thousands of them, and in order to read and write Chinese even a beginner must learn at least several hundred of the most common ones.

To make things even more difficult, there are actually two different (although related) sets of Hanzi: simplified and traditional. The simplified characters are used in the PRC and Singapore, and the traditional characters are used in Taiwan and Hong Kong. Currently LanguageDoctor.com only supports the simplified characters, although if there is demand for it we may add support for the traditional characters later.

In order for LanguageDoctor.com to work correctly, your browser must be capable of properly displaying Hanzi. If the contents of these two boxes:

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look roughly the same (not counting minor size or style differences) then your browser is already handling Hanzi correctly. If they are not the same, then you have two choices:

• You can correctly configure your browser to display Chinese. This is the "officially correct" way of doing things, and it will enable you to read pretty much any Chinese web site. The Correcting Hanzi page describes how to do it, but it may take a while (a few minutes to an hour or more, depending on which browser and operating system you are using).

• Or you can cheat: Look at the menu at the left side of your browser (depending on your screen size, you may have to scroll back up to see it). Just below the links you will see the words "Display w/:", and below that there are two radio buttons. Click the lower button (labeled "GIFs"). The Hanzi in the left-hand box above should magically fix themselves, and at the same time the garbage or empty boxes in the far upper left corner of your browser should also start displaying correctly.

  What this does is to switch the whole web site so that it sends an individual GIF file for each Hanzi. This is significantly slower than using the proper font, and it means you won't be able to adjust the font size of the Hanzi (unless you have a browser like Opera that allows you to magnify an entire page), but it's otherwise relatively painless and it works for just about any graphical web browser. You can do this trick from any page on LanguageDoctor.com, and if you change your mind just click the other button (labeled "Font") to return everything back to its original state.

Next: Pinyin Display