nciku.com an online flashcard learning site just for Chinese, with handwriting recognition to boot. It's also from my experience the most thorough online english chinese dictionary, with both audio and lots of example sentences.

As for non-web applications, heres a really good free Chinese deck:

http://www.mnemosyne-proj.org/node/30

The depressing reality is that the spin is already deep and strong.

I work for a Chinese environmental NGO, and even these younger, activist types are living in another world:

• "Google got hacked?"
• "China's censorship is comparable or more relaxed than most other developed countries"
• "Internet censorship happens to protect people from porn."
• "Google wants to leave China because it doesn't agree with internet censorship."

The next logical conclusion is that Google wants to support porn at all costs, and that's Party's spin. These arguments are what "informed" Chinese citizens believe, not to mention the uninformed 98% that has never even heard of the Tiananmen Square incident. When Google.cn gets replpaced by Bing, China's not going to notice.

The depressing reality is that the spin is already deeply rooted.

I work for an environmental NGO in Beijing, one of the few sectors that engages in "civil society" talks about policy issues -- if there's any vocation that would seem predisposed to critical political views or demand for government accountability, this should be it.

...And yet no one even appears to understand the basics of the situation. My coworkers and peers, in independent discussions, have expressed the belief that:

1. China's censorship is comparable or better than that of other countries, and most of it is for porn.
2. Google wants to "quit China" (), because they don't agree with this law; the porn bit especially.

These are my "activist" coworkers. The conversations are even more depressing if you bring up issues of internet censorship with random people you meet. The Chinese "netizen" you may read about is not politically aware, nor is the average Chinese citizen. A lot of Chinese people don't even know there's a huge political convention going on right now, and this is Beijing. With the exception of facebook/twitter-starved college kids (a quite negligible minority) and decisively radical types (like Ai Weiwei, again, quite a negligible minority) the term "Great Firewall of China" is foreign to your average Li Ming, and even more foreign to any casual dialogue.

When Google gets replaced by Bing, 98% of China won't notice or care.