Learning Potonghua - Chinese

[munnki]

I suppose I have something of a hobby in learning languages. Part of my major was in Classical Greek... although my command of Gaelic (the language my father spoke) is nigh non-existent - I barely obtained the mandatory level for attendance at University in Ireland.

I am learning Mandarin Chinese - and am going at what I would describe as a glacial pace. I'm taking a three pronged approach and am using a textbook 'Rapid Literacy in Chinese' for learning reading, Michel Thomas' Tapes for listening and the Rosetta Stone software for gaining further fluency.

I do about an hour a day - although baby sometimes interrupts that.

Anyway... I'm wondering if anybody out there either already speaks Chinese (and can read/write) or wishes a learning parter. I'm struggling with some aspects (the reading) although am making better progress with the listening aspect. I already speak one tonal language (Thai) which has made life somewhat easier.

Anybody else into their languages out there?

[davidpbrown]

One my bucket list is learning Mandarin Chinese, at least well enough I can read the news and surf the web. Partly that's to attack skills I don't have - I've little memory for language but little direct need at the moment either. Partly it's with the thought that access to Chinese might double the size of my cultural pool.

I tried the Rosetta Stone but didn't learn much before my switch to Linux. I've done a couple of short courses and even calligraphy, which were fun. I'm in no rush but it is glacial for me too.

I did try brute forcing it, with a list of the most frequent characters. I figured if I could learn the top 3000 characters that would sufficient to cover 99% of written Chinese. You can have that simple dump if it'll help - a simple lookup grid (0.5MB) (http://www.davidpbrown.co.uk/offsite/chinese-word-output.html).. a lot of the descriptors are missing but the order is of the most frequent usage. (http://lingua.mtsu.edu/chinese-computing/statistics/char/list.php?Which=MO).

If you've got a visual spacial learning memory, then you might like http://www.skritter.com/. That was the most useful tool I've found by far.