posted by maxiewawa on August 3, 2010 | 5 comments
I'venbeen looking around the (Australian) iTunes store for Chinese reading material. The best I've found is called 中文报刊. It's an app that aggregates various mainland newspapers. Another app called Pressreader is ok, but they expect you to pay.

Has anyone found anything else interesting?
signin to comment
trevelyan on August 3, 2010 | reply
Hey Max,

Haven't personally found anything -- we actually don't have an iPad yet, but are hoping to push something out eventually. A different sort of interface to all of our content, likely with less of an emphasis on the podcasts.

Am hoping we'll get our hands on one in the next couple of months and push out both an iPhone and iPad version of Popup Chinese. If you have any suggestions on things you'd like to see us do, let me know.

--david

Brendan on August 4, 2010 | reply
Hey Max --

I haven't gotten an iPad either, but I do use iBooks on the iPhone 3GS. I've been using Calibre to convert e-texts into ePub format to get into iBooks (Stanza also works, but I like the iBooks interface better). It's been a while since I looked around for Chinese content, but there is certainly no shortage of Chinese websites offering books for download in ePub format, and I believe Stanza also provides feeds of some Chinese-language news sources.

It also might be worth creating an account in the Chinese iTunes App Store, as there are some applications that are available only there. That said, I don't know how many iPad-specific apps there are yet: my guess is that the overwhelming majority of them would just be up-scaled iPhone apps.
maxiewawa on August 4, 2010 | reply
Looking forward to PopupChinese apps!

Hope to see more interactive content... something to check comprehension level, especially of more complex content. I think it's something that we're missing out on at the moment.

Brendan: Any recommendations on Chinese books? I've been reading

Oh, I tried out the HSK app, it was great! I got 15/15!!
maxiewawa on August 17, 2010 | reply
Hi everyone, have been using 读览天下 for iPad, it's fantastic! Magazines of all kinds, mostly free (and all simplified Chinese of course)! Just thought I'd let u know.
uknowwho on September 9, 2010 | reply
I tried some Chinese learning software on iPhone and a lot of them are similar. One app that catches my eye is iLearn Chinese (http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/i-learn-chinese-read-write/id389073069?mt=8) because it actually explains the character origins, at least for a few hundred of them. Now those weird characters seem to be more meaningful and I can almost write some of them just after a few minutes. By the way, I was able to practice writing on the screen of my phone. It also has a Lite version which is listed under the same developer.