Now that Monica and I have com­pleted our crazy move and life is set­tling back into a rou­tine, it’s time for me to once again get serious about some per­sonal projects I have to focus on. One of the most impor­tant is, of course, the rest of my web­site. I man­aged to get this blog set up and designed, but the rest of the web­site is still waiting for my atten­tion. Like­wise, my inter­ac­tive travel journal and my map of haunts await graphic design help. But at this moment I am focused on a dif­ferent chal­lenge: learning Man­darin Chinese.

Ever since I began dating Monica this has been a minor goal but now it is becoming much more impor­tant. I would like to be able to com­mu­ni­cate with Monica’s family and friends. And I know that there are some things, or some sit­u­a­tions in which Monica would feel more com­fort­able (or more effec­tive) speaking in her native lan­guage. Add to that the fact that our new home is in close prox­imity to a large Chinese-speaking pop­u­la­tion and I have more than enough motivation.

Monica has sup­plied me with some basic learning mate­rials. I pur­chased a word book a while back and Monica pro­vided, as a gift, the matching set of flash cards to work with. These are nice for building vocab­u­lary but don’t really help me in attempts to string together words into sen­tences or fully com­pre­hend the spoken lan­guage. This weekend I pur­chased Chi­nese: A Com­pre­hen­sive Grammar from Barnes & Noble which will help me under­stand some of the struc­tures of the lan­guage and pro­vide addi­tional vocab­u­lary. How­ever, what I really need is some kind of struc­tured learning course that will help me with the speaking and reading.

I have been looking at Roset­ta­S­tone soft­ware. It gets a lot of atten­tion and is well adver­tised on tele­vi­sion. It is sup­posed to be a nat­ural learning process, but the soft­ware is incred­ibly expen­sive. I would appre­ciate it if they pro­vided some kind of demo so I could see how they handle the writing and speaking instruc­tion, but they only pro­vide a very brief demo in Swedish (!). I don’t mean to insult the Swedes, but I am not inter­ested in learning their lan­guage. Chi­nese is sooo dif­ferent from Swedish that I would really like to know how their soft­ware han­dles that par­tic­ular language.

I did try a demo of another lan­guage instruc­tion pro­gram, the L-CEPTS trainer. Unfor­tu­nately, their Java-based appli­ca­tion had the most awful and con­fusing user inter­face. It might be cheaper than Roset­ta­S­tone, but it seems so inferior.

I am con­sid­ering a sub­scrip­tion to the instruc­tional pro­gram pub­lished by Serge Melnyk. Mr. Melnyk’s pod­cast can be down­loaded free on iTunes. The sub­scrip­tion ($10 per month) gets you access to the tran­scripts and work­sheets that accom­pany each lesson. The audio lessons handle the speaking prac­tice part of the instruc­tion; the work­sheets and tran­scripts are for the reading (and pos­sibly writing) instruc­tion. The price is right and I have enjoyed the pod­casts before. My one gripe (and this, hon­estly, is more Monica’s gripe) is that the tran­scripts and work­sheets use Sim­pli­fied Chi­nese char­ac­ters. Monica is from Taiwan and is devoted to her Tra­di­tional Chi­nese characters.

Despite this draw­back, I think the price might be worth it. The audio lessons are con­ve­nient and pro­vide an oppor­tu­nity for prac­tice, and having the tran­scripts is ben­e­fi­cial for mas­tering both the char­ac­ters and the pro­nun­ci­a­tions (now that I have a handle on the pho­netics of Pinyin).