It seems these days there are a million and one different channels for learning Chinese, and each has their own pros and cons. The problem I find with sifting through a lot of different sites though, is that inevitably you will also come across a lot of information that is either junk, irrelevant, or just plain spam.

For a while now I’ve been using twitter as part of my day to day work, but I didn’t quite see the relevance for my personal life, or how it could help me. What I have now discovered though is that it really is a great way to find useful resources, get interesting information, and to help you sort through all the junk that is out there.

Of course, the best way to do this is by following interesting people, and so I’ve gone through and had a good look around to find some sources that I think are really useful for people interested in China and learning Chinese. If there is a good source I’ve left out from this list, please let me know and I’ll update it.

Without further ado – here are some really useful sources for learning more about China and Chinese on Twitter:

@socialmandarin is the official twitter feed of socialmandarin.com – a really useful site for language learners. The twitter feed keeps you in the loop for what’s popular on the site.

@nciku is the official twitter feed of nciku.com – probably the best online dictionary site I’ve found for English<-->Chinese translations. They post a word of the day sort of thing, and other useful info too.

@ChineseHacks is Dave of ChineseHacks.com fame. He posts links to all his blog articles, interesting retweets, and other random information about China/Taiwan. Very interesting.

@HaoHaoReport is a great source of all kinds of articles related to China based on popular stories from their site HaoHaoReport.com. They have a wide array of articles – more for China watchers than learners.

@ChineseADay is a reposting of bilingual sentences from tatoeba.org. It’s a really good feed to follow to get some useful Chinese words into your daily social media diet.

@chinaSMACK are all of the popular posts from chinaSMACK.com. They translate popular articles from the Chinese web into English, and have loads of funny stuff on their site. A good way to see life in China flow by.

@ChineseTeachers post all sorts of new words and sentences on a fairly regular basis. Another useful one to follow just to get a few extra words into your daily diet.

@ChinaTweep posts news and information about China, and it’s happenings. I think it’s written a Chinese person, so a slightly different perspective on things too.

@SinoSplice is a combination of reposts from SinoSplice.com and ramblings from John (the author of that site) – there is a whole combination of stuff, from info for learners to life in China. Great stuff.

@ChinesePod posts a word of the day, and other links – mainly from their site at ChinesePod.com – a very useful site for language learners. Another good one to follow to keep your mind ticking over.

@ciaocibai – OK, it’s actually my twitter feed – I post the occasional interesting article I find, and talk about geeky things and politics with friends. Worth a follow? Yup, according to my highly biased opinion at least.

This is just a selection of useful sources I’ve found on Twitter – I’ve actually created a list over on twitter at http://twitter.com/#/list/ciaocibai/chinese with a few more in it that I plan to regularly update, so be sure to check that out as well.

Are there any great Twitter-ers that I forgot? Who else would you like to see on this list? Be sure to let me know in the comments, and if there are some good ones I’ll definitely update it.

Thanks for dropping by!