Asia - Chinese language lessons...

Hi,

I want to learn a few everyday phrases and get used to the sound of the language. Can anyone give me some info or suggestions on the right online course or books to buy with CDs or something? I'm most appreciative.

Betsy

Hi,

I want to learn a few everyday phrases and get used to the sound of the language. Can anyone give me some info or suggestions on the right online course or books to buy with CDs or something? I'm most appreciative.

Betsy

google thebeijingguide for a nifty little introduction to tourist words in Mandarin, pictures and spoken. Google more for other online lessons.

CDs vary in quality. I'll defer to others to suggest good ones. I'm interested in hearing opinions, too!

Always remember Pinyin, which you'll seen in a lot of language books....is a romanization and NOT an anglicization. This can be confusing, as what you would think, at quick glance, is a pronouciation can be quite different than what it actually sounds like!

Have a blast!

http://www.bbc.co.uk/languages/chinese/real_chinese/

I've been exploring ChinesePod (http://www.chinesepod.com/) and it looks pretty amazing. I discovered it from a positive review it got on Slate (http://www.slate.com/).

Watch CCTV-Channel 9. Its free on most sattelite and cable company programming. This will give you some general ideas on the sound of the
language. Then you can buy on eBay the pimsleur CDs volume 1. Should be
about $125-150. This will keep you busy for quite awhile. Plus you can re-sell them after you are finished with them for what you paid for them.

Buy a basic phrase dictionary as its important to have an understanding of
pinyin to help pronounce the words.

Its very difficult to learn to speak decent Mandarin without much time and practice but you will be able to recognize the sound of words fairly quickly.

Good luck. ^

http://del.icio.us and search on the term "chinese"

You'll get a bunch of references formatted like this.

ChinesePod.com - Learn Chinese With Daily Podcasts and Personal Learning Center edit / delete
to chinese podcast ... saved by 533 other people ... on 2006-01-07

Then click on the tag "chinese" in one of the references. Tags follow the "to" in the line after the link's name. For the example, the tags are "chinese" and "podcast"

Then click on "popular"

(If there's a more straightforward way to do this, I'd be interested in knowing what it is.)