I have to be honest. Most Chinese Web sites break my head completely. Clicking into your average Chinese portal or social networking site is like being dropped into the Web equivalent of a raging, psychedelic pachinko parlor. The page scrolls on forever, there are countless hundreds of links, boxes, windows and options, and every other thing blinks, waves or breaks loose and starts gliding across the page. If you read Chinese laboriously and slowly, like me, this is extra painful.

I spent many years designing and managing the development of Web sites and I was raised on a philosophy of simplicity and relative minimalism. In China this brands me as a dangerous heretic who should probably be locked up for his own safety. Nevertheless (showing my age), I remain firm in my conviction that the best Web sites are clean, easy to navigate, and don't overwhelm you with options or distractions. This is particularly true of sites that purport to be instructional or educational. That's one of many reasons I was disappointed with a new site dedicated to teaching Chinese that I explored this week.

Where to go for Chinese online. Maybe.

The site is Linese.com. Its launch was announced a few days ago and picked up and run in various news articles, including on CNET. Linese.com doesn't offend my eyes in the way that many Chinese portals do. It's not a complete overload of links and options and micro text. But it suffers from a variation on that problem: As a fresh arrival who presumably doesn't speak any Chinese, it's hard to figure out where you should go and what you should click on. There are a lot of options for lessons and information but nothing to suggest how someone interested in learning the Chinese language or simply exploring it should best approach or use the site. In the biz, we used to refer to this as poor information design.

I had a few other complaints as well. After the big announcement the site was largely broken for the first few times I tried to use it. The site was partially functional in IE but broke Firefox completely. I had to allow it to install a big whack of Active X components on my IE to get some of the lessons to work properly. Others used chunky Windows Media files that were slow to download. A lot of the content was completely inaccessible. As a PR guy, one of my basic lessons is: If it's not ready for prime time, don't announce it.

A lot of those early teething problems have been fixed and the site is working much better today, on both browsers. But that has given me the opportunity to discover a few other problems. Some of the media files still don't seem to work correctly. It's hard to know which lessons might be appropriate. Things that look like they should be links don't seem to lead anywhere. The materials seem to be a mix of very rudimentary stuff--which would be useful for beginners--and lessons that try to teach rudimentary stuff but also mysteriously assume you know much more complex phrases that are placed around the vocabulary they are teaching you. For a language site, there is also a pretty good amount of shameless Chinglish.

Is it hopeless? No. After all, who wouldn't want to learn how to chat up the World Cup or the Olympics? (Although the Olympics lesson makes you go through 21 sections of basic stuff before it gets to three sections of Olympic and sports vocabulary.) But it's half-baked and it has a lot of issues to work out if Linese.com isn't going to vanish into the great graveyard of second-rate Web sites. My suggestions are to clean up the information design; provide an introduction that explains the different materials available and how to use them; clearly segregate lessons and tools by ability; iron out the technology bugs and use more flash and less Active X and Windows Media; and get a little professional English editing (I know who Jackie Chan is, but I'm not so sure about this Jackie Chen they refer to).

Meanwhile, if you're looking for Chinese instruction online you might want to try the popular Chinese Pod.com which uses podcasts to teach Chinese and has lessons for many levels along with supplementary materials. Zongwen.com is a useful site for learning about Chinese characters (and the hysterical Hanzismatter a good site for seeing how westerners abuse them). Chinese Tools.com also has some good stuff. Another site I often use is Adsotrans. This is good for people like me who have only basic Chinese literacy. Many translation engines choke on Chinese grammar. For those of us with reasonable grammar but poor vocabulary, Adso will take a hunk of Chinese text and annotate it with pinyin and translation that you can see by rolling over words and phrases. It's not perfect, but users can update and correct it wiki-style and it's pretty useful.

Meanwhile, if you really want to learn Chinese, I have two suggestions: 1) Hire a really good private tutor. 2) Move to China.