The best free online Chinese-English dictionaries

Continuing my series on free online dictionaries (for Japanese, see here), today I present you with my favorite, free, online Chinese-English dictionaries, after the jump.

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1. nciku: Nciku is my first stop when looking up a Chinese word. I've found that they simply cover more of the words I need than the other dictionaries on this list. They often supply numerous example sentences, which also puts them ahead of most of the other dictionaries here.
   
   They supply the pinyin for the words you look up, and pinyin is supplied for example sentences via a pop-up when you hold your mouse over them. The latter is kind of a pain because you can't copy and paste it and you can't see it without doing something, but you can always copy and paste the Chinese word itself into the search field to get copyable pinyin.
   
   Example sentences can be pronounced via a pretty natural text-to-speeh program which goes beyond the simple character-by-character pronunciation of MDBG, but there's no pronunciation button available for the definitions.
   
   Another very convenient feature is that you can write characters by hand to look them up—a great feature when you can't recall the reading.
   
   If you're curious about what "nciku" means, see here and here.


2. Dict.cn: My second stop is usually Dict.cn. More aimed at the Chinese learner of English, Dict.cn's strong point is their example sentences sourced from the net, similar to ALC for Japanese. There is no pinyin and no pronunciation of Chinese words.


3. MDBG: If you dig around the internet for Chinese-English dictionaries, you'll surely run across some of the numerous online dictionaries based on the CEDICT project. But the site serving as the caretaker of the CEDICT project and one of my favorites Chinese-English dictionaries is MDBG.
   
   MDBG has a large breadth of vocabulary and always provides the pinyin. MDBG can even color code characters and pinyin syllables by tone. Audio pronunciations are provided, but they pronounce each character as if it were alone, i.e., they don't take into account systematic tone changes based on the previous tone. Like nciku, you can also write characters in with your mouse to look them up.


4. iCIBA: A lot like Dict.cn: aimed at Chinese learners of English, strong point is example sentences (which also seem to be sourced from around the net), no pinyin, and no pronunciation of Chinese words. They tend to have more, but simpler, example sentences than Dict.cn, and also will serve up related encyclopedia entries.


5. Reverso: Reverso has pinyin but no pronunciations. The word coverage generally seems to be less than the others above, but they are an additional option that I turn to occasionally.

Know of a dictionary that belongs in this list? Drop a line in the comments below!

This post was updated on October 6, 2009, to clarify the name of nciku and to note that nciku does in fact have pinyin (thanks to doviende of Language Fixation for the clarifications).

Get Chinese pinyin for any text

While I couldn't find the equivalent of Hiragana.jp for Chinese (i.e., letting you convert an entire website and then browse it), there are a few good converters that will take a block of text and convert them from Chinese characters to pinyin for you.

There are lots of them out there that simply do it character by character, but as context can affect the tones (e.g., whether the characters are part of a word or not), the best ones take this into consideration.

Here are a two of the better ones:

• Popup Chinese is a Chinese-learning website with the well-known Adsotrans character-to-pinyin tool. It's also got long lists of HSK vocab that you can easily throw into Anki.


• Chinese Tools has a whole bunch of resources for the Chinese learner, including a character-to-pinyin converter.

44 Chinese characters you may need to relearn

Great... just when you think you've checked off all your Chinese character boxes, China starts debating whether to change the boxes by modifying certain characters.

Read more... For the first time in some two decades (in which time, I'm sure, many of us have commenced our studies of Chinese), China is considering revising some characters. The revisions only affect 44 characters, and below you'll find them in their revised format (click to enlarge):



Some of these characters I doubt whether I've even seen before, while a bunch are quite familiar. At first glance, I didn't even notice the changes, but, on a second look, it seems that one of the biggest changes is that of 朩 děng becoming 木 mù. So clearly we're not dealing with a revolution here, but still something that we learners should take note of.

And all this just when Taiwan starts talking about making the jump to simplified.

I don't know about them, but I'm still holding out for the implementation of one of the few ideas from Mao Zedong that just might make sense:

Reform of Chinese characters must be carried out in the direction of total Romanization that I believe is the mainstream of language development in the world.

Then again, he also thought that backyard steel furnaces would be a good idea, and that didn't turn out so well, so maybe we should just stick with the characters and consider this idea to be in the official 30% of things that Mao got wrong.

Links:
通用规范汉字表 Tōngyòng Guīfàn Hànzì Biǎo (General-Use Standard Chinese Character Table) (in Chinese) [中国语言文字网 Zhōngguó Yǔyán Wénzì Wǎng (China Language and Writing)]
Revision of 44 Chinese Characters in Hot Debates [CRI English]

How to look up Chinese, Japanese, and Korean characters by radical in Mac OS X

If you're running Mac OS X, you've already got a built-in way to look up Chinese and Japanese characters by their component pieces, i.e., their "radicals": it's known as the Character Palette. (It, by the way, also works for the Chinese characters that used to be used in Korean as well, if you're into that.)

How to use the Character Palette to look up characters by their radicals, after the jump.

Read more... The first thing you need to do is make sure you have the Character Palette enabled.

1. From the Apple menu, open System Preferences.
2. In the Personal section (the first row of preference panes), click on International.
3. Select the Input Menu tab.
4. Make sure Character Palette is checked.
5. At the bottom of the window, make sure "Show input menu in menu bar" is checked.

Incidentally, this is also where you can select the languages in which you want to be able to type; just check off the appropriate boxes below the horizontal dividing line in the list above.

Once you've set that up, you'll have a menu that you can get to from your menu bar that looks something like this:

And here's how you can then look up a Chinese or Japanese character by its radical:

1. From the input menu, select "Show Character Palette".
2. From the View pull-down menu at the top of the Character Palette, select Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, or Japanese, as appropriate.
3. Immediately below the pulldown menu, select the "by Radical" tab.
4. Immediately below that, select the appropriate radical in the left-hand pane.
5. Select the character you're looking for from the right-hand pane.
6. To see information on the character, such as the reading, click on the triangle icon next to "Character Info" until the triangle is pointing down and the character information is displayed.
7. To see how the character looks in a variety of fonts, click on the triangle icon next to "Font Variation" until the triangle is pointing down and the font variants are displayed.

Or, if you already happen to have the character on your computer and don't need to go the radical search route, just copy and paste the character into the search field at the bottom of the Character Palette, and all the rest'll pop right up for you.

And that's it. It's a simple, always-handy way to look up Chinese and Japanese characters on your Mac.

P.S. If there's an analog to this on Windows, let me know and I'll add it.

Japanese Language Proficiency Test vocabulary list with Chinese translations

If you are studying for the Japanese Language Proficiency Test (I'm not, really, but I find the lists of vocab for the test that can be found floating about the internet are useful because they approximate frequency lists) and you happen to speak Chinese, check out this vocab list. There's no English, but you can learn your Japanese from Chinese (or learn both at the same time). It's all in traditional characters, but I'm sure you tricky netizens can find a method or two that could convert it to simplified for you.

It's got separate lists for all four levels of the test (1, 2, 3, and 4, with 1 being the hardest), or you can view the vocab all together. The list was made in 2005, so it may be a little out of date, and it was made in Taiwan, so you'll probably get that variety of Chinese.

One thing I like about this list (and that I'd like to see in other such lists) is that it notes on which syllable the stress falls in the Japanese word. My wife often says I use stress in Japanese words where there isn't any. This chart seems to back up her criticisms, given how many words are marked as having "0" (i.e., no) stress and thus should just be read flatly.

Language-learning linkwrap 7/16/2009

Company Settles Case of Reviews It Faked: Fake reviews cost this company $300,000. I wonder if Rocket Languages is on New York's attorney general's to-do list.

Raising a Child in Two Worlds: Nicole Sprinkle seems to be a bit too worried about whether her biracial child will be better at English or Spanish. Wrong question. The question she should be asking is how can I make my daughter obtain native-level proficiency in both languages? Note also the "two worlds" hyperbole of the title. Something like "Raising a Child to Use Two Tools" would be a bit more realistic.

The Chinese Language, Ever Evolving: A debate almost as exciting as Coke versus Pepsi: simplified or traditional Chinese characters.

Name Not on Our List? Change It, China Says: More fun with Chinese characters. Now, if the characters in your name aren't on a pre-approved list, you can't use them.

Great Videos in Any Language: Videos translated into more than 40 languages.

Using Skritter with kids

Earlier this week, I discovered the addictive Skritter, a tool for learning simplified Chinese characters and the tones of those characters.

As promised, on Thursday I got the chance to let my four-year-old daughter use Skritter. She naturally likes to play video games, so I asked her, "Do you want to play a Chinese character game?" Naturally the answer was yes.

So I sat her down in front of the screen. The first character, if I recall correctly, was wǒ 我 ("I"). Out of context, I'm not sure that she knew what it was, even though she heard it, so I gave her some quick example sentences so she definitely knew which wǒ it was. To make this easier for kids, it'd be great if you could replay the pronunciation and if it had example sentences in Chinese, or even if it at least could read the English meaning out loud. Then I could just show her which button to push and she could go at it all on her own.

Once she knew what she was writing, I showed her how to press the "show" button to reveal how to write the character. She knows very few characters at this point, so she had to show pretty much every one. A few she only showed once, and then, beaming, she said, "I showed it once and then just remembered it!" Bingo. I hope getting kids to learn remains this easy forever.

Once she knew what she was writing and how to figure out how to write it, I just let her go to town. For each new character, she'd ask me what the word was. Some, like rén 人, she knew, but for the most part I had to give her examples so she'd understand the meaning. But she happily sat there going through them. This certainly looks like it can be a great tool for her to learn Chinese characters.

Related: Skritter to learn Chinese characters

Top 10,000 Chinese characters

Jun Da of Middle State Tennessee University has a Chinese character frequency list that was made in 2004 based on a very large collection of online Chinese texts. The list can easily be cut and paste into Excel and then put into your favorite memorization program. The explanation of what was included in the corpus can be found here.

Skritter to learn Chinese characters

I just stumbled across Scritter today. Scritter lets you study Chinese character by writing them on the screen. And it's awesome. The implementation is very smooth. They ask you to write a character, and if you don't know it you can press a button to show it. It appears and then fades away before you can write it all. You can of course show it again, but short term memory should hold it there for you, and then you get some muscle memory action by writing it out there.

I started toying around with it to see what it was all about, and I'm addicted. Since I pretty much only type in Chinese, how to write characters is something that often slips my mind. This makes for a great refresher. And what's even more fun is that they cover tones as well. If I have one weakness in Chinese, that is it.

But what I'm most excited about is sitting my four-year-old daughter down in front of this thing. "Wanna play a Chinese game?" We'll see how that goes tomorrow hopefully. So far she's only started to recognize characters, not write them, but this seems to be a great device for getting kids to learn. My only complaint as far as children's learning goes is that the feedback that appears in the window—"Should hook", "Stroke backward", "Excellent!" and the like—are all text only. For a kid who's just learning to read, it'd be great if these were audible.

Why do we call Japan "Japan"?

Kelly of Aspiring Polyglot left this comment on my earlier post about how to say "China" in Russian and Japanese:

Would you happen to know why we call Japan 'Japan' and not Nihon or Nippon?

This is one that I dug up a long time ago because I wondered the same thing.

The kanji for "Japan" are 日本. They respectively mean "sun" and "origin", or together "origin of the sun". This is of course from the perspective of China, to the East of which Japan lies in the same direction as where the sun rises. That's also where English gets "land of the rising sun" from, which is simply a more nuanced translation of the characters than "origin of the sun".

Read more...The word in Japanese is pronounced Nihon or, with a bit more emphasis or formality, Nippon. Nihon is actually a relatively recent shortening of Nippon, which in turn is a shortening of the readings of the two characters following normal character combination rules. 日 can be read nichi or jitsu in this case, and nichi is preferred here, while 本 can be read as hon. Typically, when two character are adjacent to each other in a single word, the first ends in chi or tsu, and the second starts with h-, the chi or tsu is dropped, the consonant doubled (or っ is added for all of you who are beyond romaji), and the h- becomes a p-. You thus get Nippon. You can also see the pattern in, e.g., ippon (一本, いっぽん, "one long, slender object") combining ichi and hon, or in happyaku (八百, はっぴゃく, "eight hundred") combining hachi and hyaku.

Once I had figured all this out when I was first studying Japanese, I thought I had figured out where "Japan" came from as well; obviously people had just used the other reading for 日 at some point, i.e., jitsu, which would have resulted in a reading of Jippon, and that's only a linguistic hop, skip and a jump away from "Japan".

As it turned out, I was on the right track but not quite there.

Nihon and "Japan" ultimately share the same etymological roots, but the path to the English word isn't very clear. It's believed that it came to English via one of the Chinese dialects' pronunciation of the characters 日本. It's these same pronunciations that likely supplied both the j in jitsu, and in "Japan", so my guess was a wee bit too high in the etymological tree.

Marco Polo called Japan "Cipangu", which, in Italian, would be pronounced like "Cheepangoo". (The gu is from the Chinese character 国, meaning country or kingdom, and which is currently pronounced guó in Mandarin.) This is thought to have come from a Wu dialect like Shanghainese. The Portuguese also brought words like Giapan over to Europe, which ultimately led to the English word. Below are a few of the Chinese dialects that might have been involved and their modern day pronunciations of Japan:

Cantonese	Jatbun
Fujianese	Jít-pún
Shanghainese	Zeppen

Links:
Names of Japan on Wikipedia
Japan in the Online Etymology Dictionary

Saturday Chinese school for my daughter (and me)

To get back to the theme of ethnic experiences in the U.S. that I touched on earlier, many of you in the U.S. or Canada may remember from your childhood that you, if you're Asian, or your Asian friends always had to go to school on Saturday. While the rest of us were getting our brains rotted out by Saturday morning cartoons, Asian kids' parents forced them to do more school, as if any kid thought five days wasn't already enough. Those forced to go never seemed very happy about it, and often rebelled and stopped going when they got old enough to pull it off. As much as these kids may have been unhappy during classes, those who actually ended up sticking with it ended up (hopefully) thanking their parents, because they were probably pretty darn good at the languages that those classes were teaching them.

My daughter, age four, just kicked off her experience with this Asian-American tradition with Saturday Chinese school (yes, that is despite her Japanese mother and her Italian-American father). We recently discovered that there's one of these schools about ten minutes from our house and, although we missed the first semester, we were eager to get her started and finally got around to it today. While she's had Chinese nannies and babysitters for most of the time that she's been speaking, we found that she was progressing a lot more in English (she goes to English nursery school every day, karate once a week, and dance occasionally) and Japanese (she goes to Japanese Kumon classes twice a week and ballet once a week) than in China, whereas Chinese was originally her best language (she started speaking while we were in China).

As it turns out, her Chinese classes here are as much of a language experience for her as they are for my wife and me.

Read more...One of Felicia's babysitters had called the school this week to see what we needed to do to get her enrolled, as their online registration wasn't working. He basically said just go there at 9AM on Saturday to take care of whatever paperwork there was, and she should be set for class at 10:45AM.

We show up at the middle school where the classes are held to see a parking lot full of Chinese people (they were probably mostly or at least partially Chinese-American, but let's just keep it simple and call them "Chinese"). We then go into the cafeteria, which was something of a base for the classes and a gathering places for pretty much every one related to a kid attending any of the classes, and this too was chock full of Chinese people with an occasional white person (case in point) floating around. In the typical entrepreneurial Chinese style (that somehow, amazingly, Mao managed to suppress for a few decades last century), one person set up a store of various snacks and drinks on one table, looking like they had just bought bulk and driven it straight over here. And some of the scenes there were straight out of a movie like The Joy Luck Club, such as the cafeteria table claimed for a game of mah-jong by a group of grandparents, with grandchildren running around at their feet.

We wandered around the cafeteria for a bit and weren't sure who was in charge until someone started setting up a printer and a scanner at a desk near what I suppose was supposed to be the front of the cafeteria. So we walked up to them to inquire about what we needed to do.

We thought there might be a little issue about our daughter starting in the middle of the year, so my wife, who thinks I'm a better negotiator, had me do the talking. Although I'm pretty sure they all speak English just fine, I opted to use Chinese because of a concern about the classes. There's a Chinese class for Chinese speakers, like my daughter, and another for Chinese learners, i.e., English speakers who are starting to learn Chinese. I was concerned that they'd see my white face and think, "Oh, here's another one for the foreigner's class," and so I hoped to evade that discussion by going at them in Chinese. Doing that, they would assume that my Japanese wife is Chinese and then just put my daughter in the class that promises better language exposure by not using English (although the teacher did keep saying "sticker" in English while speaking Chinese in lieu of the perfectly available Chinese word tiēzhǐ). Sure enough, the mid-year start date was raised as an issue. We weren't concerned about my wife speaking up either, because her accent's good enough that she falls within a range that sounds Chinese, and Chinese people are always generically asking, "So you're from Southern China?" when they hear her talk.

Their first answer was, "No, we're full,", but one thing I found to be true in China was that, if someone initially said no to you, persistence could turn that into a yes, and I intended to see if the same thing worked here. The rational analysis sometimes seemed to be, "Is it less of a hassle to just say yes to this guy or to keep saying no?" If they say no and you just walk away, that's a piece of cake for them, but if you make a nag of yourself suddenly it becomes easier to just let you do whatever you want. (This is something I discovered as a kid worked with my parents too, but I'd rather my kids come up with this idea.) For instance, when I was studying Chinese in Beijing, the placement test put me a level or two below the top of maybe a dozen levels, but I wanted to be in the highest level possible because of how rapidly you can learn when you're immersed. When I was first told no, I kept bugging the person who told me no and several other people until I finally got bumped up, clearly above what the test results had gotten me. I'm not sure if this works in all bureaucracies in China (unfortunately, in some, a wad of cash will work much better), but it usually worth a shot.

The first answer we got from the Chinese administrator was, "Sorry, it's the middle of the year, we're full." So I said that we had called earlier this week and they said to show up at 9AM and we should be able to take care of everything. He asked who we spoke to and, since the babysitter called, I had no idea. I did know, however, that it was "the guy whose name and number were on the website", and I told him so. Apparently he had no idea who that was. After effectively repeating this interchange a few times, he finally gave in. I think he might have thought that the person our babysitter had spoken was someone important that was higher up in the administration, so he was weighing potentially needing to deal with that guy or just letting us sign up. He went for the signing up.

So we take care of the paperwork and whatnot and we're sitting in this cafeteria full of Chinese people. And then my son reminded me what good language-learning tools one-year-old kids can be; my son kept going up to people and pointing at them, and this would repeatedly result in them calling him cute and start talking with us.

My wife eventually left to run some errands, leaving me to escort our daughter to class. After dropping her off and again getting a chance to converse in Chinese - this time with the teacher, I was left alone. There happened to be free Chinese-langauge newspapers there so I picked one up and started reading it. It appears that the de facto standard Chinese in the U.S. uses traditional characters, and there were a few that were driving me nuts because I was sure I knew them as simplified characters but the traditional versions weren't ringing any bells. In any case, one of the articles I read was criticizing China's stimulus plan, saying it only helped bureaucrats' favored companies, while the U.S. stimulus plan was aimed at the average person. A pretty interesting read, but it was a shame I didn't have my dictionary with me because now I have to go back and reread it to find all the words I didn't know, if I even end up bothering to do so.

Today also happened to be the day of what they called "parent-teacher conferences", but were less the one-on-one meeting that that term conjures up than the teacher giving an update to all the parents at once. So I got to sit through my first such meeting in Chinese today, and I was surprised at how easily I was able to follow what she was saying. There were only two words I didn't get, but since they are things that the kids will be doing this upcoming semester (I got that much), I'll probably be learning the words soon enough.

So now we have a chance every Saturday to hang out in a hall full of Chinese speakers, and as my daughter makes friends and we meet people there, I'm sure we'll be putting our Chinese to great use. This is just one example of the many creative ways that you can find people to chat with, if not outright native-speaker tutors, and also get other kinds of exposure to your target language in less-than-obvous places far from the language zone. If you had asked me where I could find hundreds of Chinese people gathered together every Saturday in the New Jersey burbs just a month ago, I'm sure I would have had no idea. But now that I have found just that, it's definitely a great language-learning opportunity for all members of my family - and not only those for whom we're paying tuition.

Best online dictionaries for Chinese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, and Spanish

After the jump,Below you'll find a list of my favorite free online dictionaries for each of the languages I speak. There are numerous other dictionaries out there that you need to pay for, but I'm interested in doing this without shelling out a dime because, well, because you can, so why shell out that dime? Moreover, some of these websites have a lot more than just language-learning dictionaries, but here I'm just looking at their dictionaries.

If you'd like to just cut to the chase and get to a list of dictionaries by language, click here. Otherwise, read on for a brief description of each dictionary.

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• WordReference.com: This is one of my favorite online dictionaries and my start-off point for Italian and Spanish. It has generally great word coverage. For Chinese and Japanese, my big complaint is that they don't tell you how the characters are pronounced.
  
  Languages: English to and from French, Italian, German, Russian, and Spanish. In beta, English to and from Chinese, Czech, Greek, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, and Turkish.


• Reverso: This is my start-off point for Portuguese and a great back-up for the others. I generally prefer WordReference to this because I've found their coverage to be a bit better, especially for phrases, but it's a close call. The specialized dictionaries are also a welcome addition.
  
  Languages: English to and from Chinese, French, French business terms, French computer terms, French medical terms, German, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Spanish computer terms.


• ALC: This is my start-off point for Japanese and my favorite dictionary of them all. From what I gather, in addition to having a standard dictionary, this dictionary trolls the net for examples on the net where the phrase in question is in both Japanese and English and then adds that to their database. Even if there's no specific dictionary entry, you'll be able to get the third-party translation. I've been able to find difficult legal terms here that I was unable to find anywhere else. My only complaint is that, as it's made for Japanese users, it doesn't tell you how kanji words are pronounced. Which is why I still make frequent use of the next one...
  
  Languages: English to and from Japanese.


• Goo: Goo's dictionary is a more standard dictionary than ALC that has good coverage and provides the pronunciation for kanji words.
  
  Languages: English to and from Japanese.


• Jeffrey's: While pretty rough in appearance, this serves as a valuable back-up Japanese dictionary and is the only one I use that is aimed at Japanese learners rather than Japanese speakers.
  
  Languages: English to and from Japanese.


• MDGB: My first stop in Chinese. Geared toward English speakers, they have great word and phrase coverage and also provide the pronunciation and audio recordings of pronunciations.
  
  Languages: English to and from Chinese.


• Dict.cn: This is an excellent dictionary that takes a page from ALC and gets samples from the net. It is another of my favorites, although it doesn't provide you with the pronunciation of characters as MDGB does.
  
  Languages: English to and from Chinese.


• Iciba: Another solid Chinese dictionary, similar to Dict.cn.
  
  Languages: English to and from Chinese.


• Lexilogos: This site is great because it lets you look up your word into all the other major dictionaries, including my mainstays of WordReference and Reverso, all from a single page. It makes for a one-stop-shop in French.
  
  French to and from English and many, many other languages.


• LEO: This dictionary beats WordReference in terms of the number of phrases it generates for each word, and hence has become my first stop when looking up German words. It is one of several very good English-German dictionaries.
  
  Languages: English to and from German.


• BEOLINGUS: Another solid entry in the German category, with results similar to LEO.
  
  Languages: English to and from German. German to and from Portuguese and Spanish.


• English Grammar Online: Yet another solid entry in the German category, again with results similar to LEO.
  
  Languages: English to and from German.


• SpanishDict: This is another very solid Spanish dictionary that I turn to from time to time. They claim to be the largest Spanish-English dictionary on the net.
  
  Languages: English to and from Spanish.


• Merriam-Webster: Yet another solid Spanish dictionary.
  
  Languages: English to and from Spanish.


• Woxicon: This one gives very short, typically one-word translations between multiple languages at the same time. While it does not have lot of depth, I've found it particularly useful for figuring out, say, whether the way something is expressed in one Romance language is the same in another.
  
  Languages: To and from Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, and Swedish.


• LookWAYup: This one limits what you get in the free version to entice you to purchase an upgrade version. I use it primarily as a back-up when one of my mainstays turns up blank.
  
  Languages: English to and from Dutch, French, German, Portuguese, and Spanish.


• Ultralingua: Ultralingua makes high-quality dictionaries for download or for subscribers. The free dictionaries they host on their website allow unlimited access to their dictionaries but a limited number of searches per day. While this means they cannot be your mainstay dictionary, they are a great back-up dictionary to try out when other ones aren't given you the word you're looking for.
  
  Languages: English to and from Esperanto, French, German, Italian, Latin, Portuguese, and Spanish. French to and from German, Italian, and Spanish. Portuguese to and from Spanish.

Beyond the above dictionaries, if you can't find the word you're looking for try plain old Google. The trick is to write the phrase in the target language and then write another phrase in English that you think would be in a translation of it. Doing this, you can typically find a text that contains the word and is translated into English (which is exactly what ALC does and is why I love it so much), and then all you need to do is figure out how they match up. You may need a native-speaker tutor for a bit of help in that regard (if they can't just tell you what it means to begin with).

Here are my favorite dictionaries for each of my languages in the order I typically turn to them.

Chinese

1. MDGB
2. Dict.cn
3. Iciba

French

1. Lexilogos

German

1. LEO
2. BEOLINGUS
3. English Grammar Online

Italian

1. WordReference.com
2. Reverso

Japanese

1. ALC
2. Goo
3. Jeffrey's

Portuguese

1. Reverso
2. LookWAYup

Spanish

1. WordReference.com
2. Reverso
3. SpanishDict

Japanese kanji by frequency of use

I was searching for a comprehensive list of Japanese kanji by frequency of use, and I managed to track down a list on Jonathan's Japan Journal. The list covers some 3,000 characters in order of frequency, with the data vaguely attributed to a now-dead link from Aichi University. While it's not quite the authoritative source I'd like to have, it looks like the real deal.

For any students of Japanese out there, you'll be quick to note that the list of daily use characters only has about 2,000, and even if you add in the additional name characters you only get a couple hundred in to the 2,000s. This list goes we'll beyond that, so if you're thinking about studying based on this list you may want to limit it to the first 2,000 or so.

And, for good measure, here's a frequency list for Chinese characters.