Quote: (12-21-2012 01:58 PM)Vacancier Permanent Wrote:
BB,
Before buying any course, head over to Frostwire or any torrent site and download Pimsleur Mandarin Chinese Level 1, Level 2 and Level 3. Each level is comprised of 30 lessons of about 30 minutes each. If you were to buy it, it would cost you about 330/Level so about 1k total. But thanks to the internet, you can get it for free. Pimsleur has been the best language course at least for me. This is how I started Brazilian Portuguese about 8-9 years ago and gave me a very solid foundation before my first trip to Brazil back in 2005. I'm also using Pimsleur for Russian, Mandarin and Japanese. As a side note, 2 years ago, I enrolled in a Chinese and Japanese course at a local college here during the evenings. Long story short, I learned more Japanese using the Level 1 Pimsleur than a full semester at a college.
When are you going to China?
How easy did you find the chinese to pick up? I guess the biggest question I have is how well do they explain/help you correctly say the various tones?