when asking if you speak chinese, i have heard some speakers use zhongwen instead of hanyu for "chinese language". Which is more correct?

hanyu, putonghua, zhongwen, guoyu, i suppose u can call it hanwen......... all the same basically 汉语，普通话，中文，国语，汉文。。。。都可以 If you ever see a character you don't know go here http://www.nciku.com/ it could break all those down for you to understand.

Hi! Thanks for the post! Hanyu and zhongwen both refer to Chinese language, and they used to differ from each other in that zhongwen stands for written Chinese and hanyu refers to spoken Chinese. Yet nowadays the difference doesn't really exitst. So they are basically interchangeable. Hope this helps! All the best for your Chinese learning!

http://www.mdbg.net/chindict/chindict This site I find is the best of all those I have tried. For translation from English or Pinyin and for sentence translation, typing of Pinyin and characters. It is free and easy to use. You can have it running as a second window while you are studying text etc.. Barryh