There’s a wealth of material available online, but you might want to try and go beyond commercial websites like ChinesePod.com or its competitors. Don’t get me wrong, I think CP is awesome, but supplementing your study with dense and authentic material is simply crucial.

Dictonaries & Word lists
HSK Vocabulary on Wikipedia (full list with more than 8000 items, both simplified and traditional)
nciku – probably the best, most up-to-date dictionary with lots of additional tools
MDBG dictionary, very useful, especially for sentences/pinyin, offers nice tools like flashcards and quizzes
Character list covering about 4000 commonly used hanzi, with sample uses and stroke order, both traditional and simplified
Another character list (3000 entries)
Taeglich Chinesisch (A daily dose of Chinese) German website introducing characters through mnemonics.
Characters by School Grade (Taiwan, so everything’s in traditional characters)
Animated Characters
Chinese Etymology Apart from being very revealing, this dictionary might provide clues for mnemonics.

Note: You may want to work with several frequency lists because they seem to have been compiled in a somewhat arbitrary fashion. Of course, that is not the case, but the algorithms used to create them do not necessarily reflect everyday usage. In this respect, the HSK categories are particularly at odds with actual usage.

Grammar & Sample Sentences
Chinese Usage Dictionary Excellent resource on grammar patterns, distinctions between near-homonyms and how to avoid common mistakes
Chengyu Idioms Chengyu explained in English.

Music & Media
Taiwan Panorama Read about Taiwan to your heart’s content
Anti-CNN The name says it all. Unusual points of view, in Chinese.
Neocha A popular Chinese music database, inspired by MySpace
Chinese Voice Recordings of short essays and stories. Suitable for intermediate students.
ERF International Inspirational Christian audio material , published weekly. More advanced. Admittedly, that’s a somewhat unusual way to improve your Chinese, but at least the quality is better than that of most bilingual sermons you’ll find on iTunes.
Youku, Sogou MP3 and Tudou host lots of movies/news reports/mp3 files, much more extensive than YouTube cause no one gives a damn about copyright, but due to that they are not entirely legal (I’m only including them for the sake of completeness, I’m not advocating using these websites).
小i An entertaining little chat bot.
CCTV 4 online stream. In contrast to all other CCTV channels, CCTV 4 is available most of the time.

Literature & Poetry
Chinese Poems Chinese, pinyin and English texts of poems by some of the greatest Chinese poets
Read Novels Complete novels online. It could hardly get any better. No audio, afaik, though.
QQ Blogs Gateway to a gazillion of weblogs, written by Chinese. Topics ranging from technology over fashion to society. Highly recommended. (To read a blog, just click on any link, really. ;) )
Sina Blogs see above
Harry Potter translations errors Funny analyses of mistakes in the Chinese translations of the books as well as a guide to specific vocabulary.
Chinese Classics (Translation) Translations as well as some original texts.
Classical Literature (Chinese) Full texts, including well-known classics like A Dream of the Red Mansion, Romance of Three Kingdoms or Water Margin.
China Youth Net Encyclopedia Educational material on a variety of topics (literature, history, philosophy, art, military, sport)

Food & Travel
How to Order Chinese Food If you’ve ever wanted to know how to say “mangostane” (or wondered how to ask “What on earth IS a mangostane?”) in Chinese or if you’re interested in vegetarian/regional cuisine, this place is a goldmine. The best part: Includes pictures of most dishes, and both characters and pinyin.

To be continued…(My Favorites folder contains more than 700 links, so sorting through all of them might take a little while.)

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