So let's say I want to learn Mandarin as much as possible in just 2 months. During those two months, I have just about all the time in the world, but still want to leave enough time so I can take breaks and learn Japanese (My primary focus). Oh, and I happen to not be a complete beginner in Mandarin (Took 3 years in highschool, aiming to go for the 4th year but unlikely as of now due to poor skill).

I only know a few resources for Chinese such as Smart.fm and http://www.nciku.com/.

Are there any fun stuff to do while doing Mandarin? Maybe games, books, or movies?

Fun is illegal in China.

I just study Mandarin from textbooks and random Chinese direct download sites for now.

I know people around here don't typically agree with this type of thing, but you can get about 2 months worth of directed audio lessons here:
http://www.fsi-language-courses.com/Chinese.aspx

I've been using it, and while it can be mind numbing at times, you also learn a lot, and it has some good pronunciation tips.

I don't want to hijack this thread, but... Anyone know of a Chinese equivalent to Tae Kim? Particularly something which is ripe for sentence mining. I've been looking for something like this for a while now.

PS: And while we're at it, I'm looking for a word list like KO2001 for Chinese. I'm trying to build a method for Chinese that is similar to the RTK->Tae Kim->KO2001 path people are following here...

taiwanese dramas!

Besides that, lots of popular japanese/english stuff is available in chinese as well, try eg. yesasia.


@mafried
I'd be interested in something like that as well... http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Chinese may be good to begin with, but it doesn't even come close to tae kim. I've mainly been using music and dramas so far.

Mandarin.... what a hard but interesting language... haha. A whole year I spend on that language and got literally nowhere. I started Japanese and I've done so much more in just 5 months. But it could be said that Japanese has just been more fun for me.

I'm going to try again next year but I would really recommend just sucking it up and memorizing the hanzi preferably using the movie method(drmoviemethod.blogspot.com). It's summer now. You could memorize all (common) 3000 hanzi by the end of July then have some fun during august.

Some useful sites
zhongwen.com
http://de.mdbg.net/chindict/chindict.php?page=translate
http://www.woyouxian.com (a lot novels by people like Kafka, Hemingway, and surprisingly even Marx)

If you look hard on the net, you can even find various works like Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Ulysses. So don't feel you should relegate yourself to the boring stuff on smart.fm. Just plug in 50 sentences from smart.fm then move on to other things.

mafried, I recently (yesterday actually) posted on my blog about adapting the RTK>Tae Kim>KO2001 method to Chinese. I came up with something like this:

Quote:1. Pronunciation and Romanization module from FSI's Standard Chinese

2. Remembering the Hanzi I and II, when II becomes available. Until then, RTH I and some sort of frequency list for the next 1500 or so characters, or Harbaugh's book/zhongwen.com if you want to learn 4000+ characters

3. Sentence mining from Schaum's and Dictionary for Readers of Modern Chinese Prose

4. Unfortunately no resource like KO2001 exists for Chinese yet that I know of. I think your best bet is to take vocab lists from well-known textbooks or HSK lists, and look up example sentences using the words. John DeFrancis's ABC Chinese-English dictionary would be a good resource for this, as is A Chinese-English Dictionary, forthcoming for Pleco (with 60,000 examples). You could also look up the vocab on ChinesePod.

Books I've found very useful are Pleco (a must have as far as I'm concerned), Rick Harbaugh's Chinese Characters: A Genealogy and Dictionary (the book version of zhongwen.com), Johan Björksten's Learn to Write Chinese Characters, Fred Fang-yu Wang's Introduction to Chinese Cursive Script, Wu Yuan's An Idiom a Day (gives you the stories behind 365 成語), John DeFrancis's ABC Chinese-English Dictionary, Claudia Ross's Schaum's Outline of Chinese Grammar, Stanley Mickel's Dictionary for Readers of Modern Chinese Prose: Your Guide to the 250 Key Grammatical Markers of Chinese (with lots of example sentences), and of course, RTH.

Some useful websites are ChinesePod, chinese-forums.com, mdbg.net, Chinese Etymology, 56.com (Chinese TV online), beelinetv.com (streaming TV channels from all over the world, 16 are Chinese), and this list of 9933 Chinese characters in order of frequency (from a corpus of 193.5 million characters).

bflatnine, thanks for the post. Forgive me for not seeing it earlier, but I've been away.

Steps 3 and 4 of your plan is where we need some more work, I think. I have an idea for 4 (see my Hanzi Odyssey thread), but I have yet to find a good grammar resource for step 3. I'm thinking of something like Tae Kim's Guide to Japanese, JSPfEC, or UBJG, or Tex's French Grammar for those that have studied français. The existing grammars for Chinese, however, are longer and more comprehensive which makes them good reference sources, but inefficient as a Tae Kim substitute.

I'm still looking, and hopefully one of us will find something. But otherwise we may have to pave our own way here...

Someone has started seeding lots of the DLI courses, most are public domain like the FSI course, there is a torrent at: http://www.mininova.org/tor/2842299

Don't know if the course is any good, but thought it may be helpful to some people. There's a whole bunch of audio and various (probably graded) readers. Not many seeders at the moment though.

Chinese Pod is still the best...