A friend of mine's wife is Chinese. To better communicate with his in-laws and share the language with their two young children, he is doing the Pimsleur course with a lot of success.

My 2 cents: If you're serious about learning (a key question to ask yourself ;) start with an immersion program. Chinese is too hard to learn casually like some of the Romance languages. You need a strong foundation in the basics prior to moving on to more informal part-time classes. Middlebury (http://www.middlebury.edu/academics/ls/) or Monterey (http://language.miis.edu/ifl/silp.html) summer programs are fantastic, if you can find the time off. Or just pick up a great program in-country...let me know if you need a recommendation. ;)

My girlfriend passed through a foreign language podcast phase last year. For Chinese, she suggested http://www.chinesepod.com/

I read it, and it looked like a nice way to quickly learn the basics of the language.

I teach Chinese at a junior college. It is a difficult language to try to "teach yourself". I recommend really trying to learn Pinyin thoroughly. I agree that Pimsleur is a pretty good method, and I used it to learn some Vietnamese with some success. Pimsleur may be your best bet. Be forewarned: it's all 'audio' with nothing written down.
Monterrey and the Middlebury immersion courses are outrageously priced -- Middlebury costs about 7,000 dollars for a summer immersion course. You'd do better to hire a personal tutor who is from the Mainland and has a standard accent and a good grounding in Pinyin and Chinese grammar.
Good luck!

I agree with the immersion programs. Also, I worked in Japan for four months this year and I found the Rosetta Stone program helpful. http://www.rosettastone.com/en/

Go Cat,

Spense is a fantastic starter.
I would highly reccomend Jan Wong's two books on china "Red China Blues" & "From Mao to now". In Xinran's "The Good Women of China" a series of profiles and stories reveal the nature of being a woman in china.

"China Wakes" by Sheryl Wudunn by Nicholas D. Kristof is still my favourite cultural book on China to date.

Please add "Will the Boat Sink the Water?: The Life of China's Peasants" by Chen Guidi and Wu Chuntao to your reading list.

This expose written by a husband-wife team who traveled to the remote province of Anhui in China to report the miserable existence of the peasants.

This book has been banned by the Chinese government and it will provide you another very important perspective on China.

Re: learning the language

I also have heard a lot of good things about Pimsleur's audiobooks.

I myself am trying to brush up on Chinese (I took a year in college). I recently purchased "Dr. Blair's Mandarin Chinese in No Time" for my ipod. I love it. It has you learn Chinese in the context of a story. You are a graduate student that has come to China to do research and stumble across a small crisis where pirates have stolen a national treasure... Absolutley silly. But it seems to be working for me.

I do agree, however, that looking at the "pinyin" spelling of words can help quite a bit. I'm not really sure what the best resource for that is. Perhaps an English-Chinese dictionary? A silly one I have is called "Making Out in Chinese" (I am embarrassed to admit al this, but there was this girl in college...).

Good luck!

You must visit http://www.chinesepod.com

It's a great introduction to mandarin and their teaching style and resources are wonderful. (podcasts are free, extra resources available for a fee, free trial available)

Kristen and I really enjoy them. The "Saturday Show" makes us laugh out loud.

You might also wish to visit them at this cool photo-sharing site that you may have heard of:
http://www.flickr.com/groups/chinesepodgroup/

Enjoy!

Thanks everyone for your recommendations, I've ordered some Pimsleur audio CDs, and got a few books.

Interestingly, one of the friends I met at the Santa Cruz thing said that he was teaching his French wife Chinese, and recommended learning the most common 500 Chinese characters. While some are pictograms or ideograms, they're often recombined into phonetics. He says if you learn the written language early in your study, it makes the spoken language so much easier (and people who learn the written language first also have an easier time of it than learning it after a level of speaking competence).

In any event, it seems a big challenge, but very worthwhile. I'm very excited about it! Thanks again for the recommendations.

Tone. It's all about tone. There's a fundamental neuro-linguistic divide between languages that use tone solely for expression and emphasis and those that use it to convey explicit meaning. When you learn an Asian language as a 3-year old, your brain quickly auto-adapts to assign inherent meaning when you hear tones. A native-speaker finds it difficult to consciously think "Oh, I guess that "my" is high-tone, and that one is low-tone." They just think of the it all in one piece. Those of us not born into it have to force ourselves to create a new column in our linguistic database table for the tones. This is *much* harder for most people than just learning written latinate vocabulary.

That said, it helps if you're an auditory learner. I'm more associative and visual, so I generally have to 'see' a word and think about its meaning to recall it. For an Asian language, I find that I can only acquire the tones of the spoken language through lots and lots of repetition and listening to tapes. This runs against my first instinct, which is to read, write, repeat. However, neuroplasticity is a wonderful thing, if you're patient and humble, but it requires an adjustment to our expectations. An immersion is a big plus, but you can also get a lot of value out of regular practice and lots of listening.

Also, if by "the most common 500 characters" you mean the radicals (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_radicals), then yes, that's where Chinese speakers tell me you should start. These are sort of like the latin roots, suffixes and prefixes we rely on in romance languages, only more essential. There are only a couple hundred of them.

Regarding Pinyin: it depends on how seriously you plan to pursue the language. I'm told Pinyin is really handy as a learning tool, and for the occasional traveler, but can become a crutch that blocks your advancement. Ideally, if you're committing to making Chinese a hobby-for-life, focus on learning and thinking in Chinese characters whenever possible, and don't learn to rely too heavily on Pinyin. It's (They're) a wonderful, highly-expressive language(s), but difficult to fully appreciate and make real progress in without making that transition.

Speaking of neuroplasticity, a few adventurous professionally-motivated types have told me of doing brief (2-8wk) subchronic courses of eg. tianeptine during initial immersion in languages with phonemes difficult to discriminate for non-native speakers. Probably above your risk threshold, but (from my small-n anecdotal evidence) quite successful.

pearl s. buck's books are great; i've read _the good earth_ and _peony_ so far :P

cheers!

I studied Mandarin in the 80s (when pinyin in the states was relatively new) and found the Taiwanese bopomofo to be really useful. Bopomofo is an alternative phonetic representation. I found it easier to map an abstract phonetic representation (with the bopomofo symbols) to Chinese than using roman characters as with pinyin. Also, the publishers of beginner books and classical poetry books often put the bopomofo representation right next to the Chinese characters which is easier than looking on a separate line or page for pinyin. The most useful, however, for me, was the bopomofo dictionary.

Learning radicals is a good way to start, however. I'm not sure why my professor (who was at Middlebury and Yale) didn't do that approach with us. I think not having a basis in radicals makes the learning process a bit chaotic and unstructured. One of the biggest challenges I faced was trying to figure out the meaning and sounds of new characters. By having a good understanding of radicals, you will be better eqiupped to understand new characters and may even be able to figure out their pronunciation.

I've studied Chinese and some Japanese since long time ago. For the first steps, there are several alternatives. PINYIN is not bad. Chinese learn PINYIN as the first step nowadays.(hundreds years before, we have a group of simple eastern/chinese characters similar to PINYIN) For aldults, PINYIN is not always fun to learn though. Besides, in PINYIN there are the famous/difficult 4 SHENG[1]/声 (TONE).

Learning Chinese Characters are instead more fun: you can learn one by one. So generally learn characters for their meaning, while PINYIN is
for pronunciation and recitation. You learn
ZHONG[1]/中(center) when you see it just like the center. You learn XIN[1]/心(heart) when you see it just like a heart. you put ZHONG[1] on top of XIN[1], you get another ZHONG[1]/忠(loyal), meaning "loyal". You can even find it useful for learning Japanese. For example: JIA[3]/假 MING[2]/名 in Japan is very important, the characters are
the same, Japanese call it 假名KANA. Then you have to pay attention to the BI[3]/笔 HUA[4]/画 (the sequence to write the characters). Well, there's
a lot KANJI(Chinese Characters) in Japanese.

The good news is that, in my opinon, there's not much "syntax" and "tense" in Chinese. Roughly, "I have learned some French", "I had learned some French", "I learned some French", "I have been learning French" could all be expressed as "WO[3]XUE[2] GUO[4] FA[3] YU[3]" 我学过法语.
Nobody will care too much about the tense: it is in the past.

DVDs/Books? I dont know. I remember I'd ever hear Chinese Radio broadcasting in SF area. You can also watch CCTV 4, which is accessible from CA. Well, you can also find a pen pal who want to learn to startup a company like Flickr ;-)

I am not a language specialist so my opinions are just based on my experience. Oh at least I am a native Chinese :-P

My kids are learning Mandarin (wife speaks) so I've been trying to learn a little bit too so I'm not always the "outsider".

The Pimsleur tapes are a great intro. I think it's a good idea to learn some of the sounds, basic words/phrases and pronunciation just to get your feet wet.

Pinyin is also a great help for reading (though my kids are learning Zhuyin which is still a mystery to me).

There's also a ton of good stuff on the web. Two online resources I use are:
Chinese Forums:
http://www.chinese-forums.com/
(great community of learners, lots of useful advice and knowledgeable folks)

Learning Mandarin Spot
http://www.fanpop.com/spots/learning-mandarin
(more recent find, well organized list of web resources for online mandarin resources - i've found some great sites via this link)

Good luck!

This is a great collection of advice & suggested reading.

I'm really happy to see you asked to apply your intelligence and heart to this important challenge. Can't think of anyone I'd rather see in your place!

Really great to see you doing this Caterina!

I'd add chinesepod to your list:

http://www.chinesepod.com

given a sweet and regular amount of time, city college in sf has excellent mandarin courses for cheap! and possibly some good private tutor recommendations. if you erase 30+ years from your life and you can enroll in CAIS (www.cais.org) preschool through high school (which is where i hope my little girl might end up). CAIS might also have some smart (snarky?) high school kids who'd be interested in private tutoring gig.

I am interested in 4 week immersion program in China to learn the language and culture. Does anyone know of succesful programs in China, probably Beijing?

I am a teacher in teaching chinese as a foreign language. i recommend you to take some courses first, such like pinyin or other basic things. I don't think you need to learn chinese characters, to be honest, they are really difficult for foreign learners. Second, you should buy some listening materials, also you should practice as much as possible.
Here are two website located in beijing, they provide teaching chinese and practicing chinese services with real people online. u can have a try.
http://www.echineselearning.com/
http://www.echineseonline.com/j.do?sid=aabb&type=1
Hope this can be helpful for you!
Have any questions in learning, you can send me email.

hi there:
i m glad to learn that u are learning chinese. i bet the experience is nice, isn' t it ? to tell u the truth, i m a chinese student of university of international realations. here, i m doing my work --to intrduce good blogs to my pals. and u are the first bloger i give my comments. may u make great progress in learning chinese. if u need help, just let me know.
best wishes

Best web sites for learning chinese:

www.chinesepod.com
www.chinese-tools.com

Best books for beginners:

Beginner's Chinese with 2 Audio CDs
http://www.amazon.com/Beginners-Chinese-2-Audio-CDs/dp/0781810957/sr=1-1/qid=1164556585/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/104-7388234-3494354?ie=UTF8&s=books

Essential Chinese 1500
http://www.lulu.com/content/530690

I started learning Chinese. I quit after 2.5 months. It's hard to learn.

I guess you have to find a teacher that you like and that will pay attention to you when you say you're not getting it. Someone that can walk at your pace, because if not. What the heck are you going to do?

And a great start is to listen to chinesepodcast. It's great.

If you really want to learn Mandarin, Shi-Da in Taiwan (http://mtc.ntnu.edu.tw/) is a really good choice. You don't only learn the language but also the customs and traditions. Teaching methods are both in BoPoMoFo (phonetics) and in PinYin. Although, in my opinion, I think using BoPoMoFo you get to learn the pronunciation much better then with PinYin. With PinYin, it is a bit similar, but in the end the pronuncaition is not accurate.

I recommend that you look into the UC Berkeley extension classes. I have lucked out the past few years studying classical languages there with a brilliant professor. I hear that the Chinese classes are very well attended.

I am now living in France (relocation), but only speak English and Spanish. I have heard a couple of the Pimsleur CDs, but it is too expensive to buy new. Does anyone know of any second-hand methods of purchase?

Cheers - Dave

Hey Caterina,

I actually majored in Mandarin Chinese in college! Unfortunately, the only time that I use it anymore is at restaurants and occassionally in development meetings here at Yahoo!...but both of these end up being just for novelty's sake.

By far, the most useful thing I did was a summer immersion course. I studied at Princeton in Beijing for a summer between my sophomore and junior year in college:
http://www.princeton.edu/~pib/

I took a year of language first, and then took my "second" year during the eight week program. We weren't supposed to speak one word of English for the entire duration, even with our roommates or while out on the weekends. While talking to my parents on the phone (yes, cheating in English) I would even cut in with Chinese words from time to time on accident.

Anyway, I know they have a first year program (which doesn't require the English ban). I recommend them 100%, if you have eight weeks to spare...

Cheers -c

Hello,
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不诚勿扰!