I'm learning Chinese!

Awesome! Now you can decipher the tattoos above your favorite stripper's ass crack!

Welcome to hell.

I'm with you there.

Try to immerse yourself into the language, like whenever you can.

Ask your friends to talk to you in Mandarin, even if it bugs the shit out of you. Try to watch what you can manage in that language too, from Hero and Crouching Tiger, to those piss-poor god-wretched chinese soap opera.

I'll most likely get a migraine. A chinese one.

Man, learning Chinese on your own is pretty hard. If you want to learn how to write it's quite a lot of memorization and repetition. I took Chinese for 3 years in college and lived there for a semester as well. I found that once you have the basics the most important thing is to immerse yourself in the language.

My Chinese improved so much in the 5 months I was living there it was ridiculous. My brother also had the experience of studying Chinese for a year and then he went over there and taught English for a year. His Chinese was decent enough by the time he got back though.

As far as Chinese girls being hot though, I have to say watch out. Some are and some really really aren't. And after talking to my cousin (who has lived in Shanghai for almost 4 years now) mainland Chinese girls can be kind of crazy.

Still, it's a fun language to know and it lets you laugh at people's lame tattoos. Especially when the tattoo guy screws up and puts in on backwards. Awesome!

Good luck.

Right on spot. The fact that they're crazy in chinese make them look even more crazier. They are probably the most girly girls on earth. Borderline annoying.
But I met a couple of cool ones also.

What I love about the mainland girls are the ones that blow snot rockets out of nowhere.

Best. turn off. ever.

"No pain, no gain"

Good luck--I don't speak Chinese, but I went through the same thing with Japanese. Unless you're one of those rare people who has a gift for languages, the best thing that you can do is take a class. It's hard to do when you're working, but look around and see if you can find a reputable course that fits your schedule and your bank account. If you have the time, I'd say get yourself into an immersion course, either at home or in China (maybe at home would be better if you're just starting out--you can at least order dinner and pay your bills when all you can say is "Hi").

Also, I agree that it's cool to be able to read the characters. Still, if only have a limited amount of time, focus on speaking first. You can spend endless hours learning to write characters for words that you don't know how to use. If you keep at it, you'll eventually sort things out. But that can be a long investment of time. Think about kids--they learn to talk before they learn to write (don't they?). Once you understand and can produce speech, it's much easier to learn to write.

Like other people were saying, if you spend some time getting the basics down, you'll really take off when you get to China. I've met so many expats living abroad who never really get the basics down. They've memorized a ton of phrases to use (or misuse) to get by, and eventually they convince themselves that they know the language. T

Hahaha! I totally forgot about the snot rockets. It's awesome when you're sitting in some restaurant (perhaps in a smaller province like Henan) and some woman walking by just stops in front of the window and lets one fly. Yeah ... that's awesome.

As far as learning the characters, I think it's more important in Chinese than it is in Japanese. There is no alphabet you can use on the side. The typical romanization (Pinyin) isn't really something that most Chinese will want to or be able to deal with. Also, it helps you remember the specific meaning of the words. With so many homonyms or words that differ only by tone, writing out characters when people don't understand what you're saying can be a lifesaver.

Plus, Chinese people love to try to trace the character on the palm of their hand with a finger if you don't understand what they're saying. This will help you in no way. You will never be able to tell what character they are drawing and it will only serve to frustrate you and them simultaneously.

Still, China is a crazy place and you never know what's going to happen there so it's definitely worth it. I was like 3 weeks away from moving back over there to live last year when I found a new job and ended up staying in the US instead. Plus, I love watching babies and small children crap on the street.

Rosetta Stone is a good program. We used it sometimes in my Chinese class while I was at college.

Something you might find useful is practicing reading things out loud. Just short little sentences. Get your Chinese friends to do simple dialog with you. My college's Chinese Dept. still has some stuff online. Some of it is only accessable if you are on the campus (because it's copyrighted by the authors) but there are also some skits with videos of native Chinese speakers performing them (they are quite short ... maybe 6-8 lines) that are really good for getting a few phrases down.

Chinese is all about repetition. If you repeat it often enough, you don't even have to think about it--especially tones. Hmmm, yeah I guess that's about all the info I can think of. For now.

As far as learning characters, the way I learned was by writing a character over and over. For my Chinese class the first two semesters we would have assigments that were merely write each vocab word for the chapter 20 times.

We would also have assigments where we would have to copy entire dialogues from the chapter. I know a lot of my classmates complained about it as 'busy work.' But like I said, Chinese is all about repetition. You have to use and write the characters a lot to learn them.

My class would also require us to perform skits like the ones I linked to in my last post. We would have to be able to speak both sides of the skit with another classmate and then be able to write the entire skit to paper. Forcing yourself to be able to remember sentences and how to write them definitely helped me. My grammar was still never that great (as far as written stuff went ...) but it did help me improve my character reading ability.

There were also lessons in workbooks that went with the textbook where you would have to answer questions about the dialog or use various new grammar points. All of the writing and thinking about the words can't help but get you to concentrate on the characters and learn them.

I don't know if this is the kind of stuff that you would be able to do on your own or would really be more likely to require a textbook or something. If you don't want to go the route of a textbook, you may miss a lot of random grammar points that will make learning the language easier.

That doesn't mean you can't still just buy a children's book and spend hours trying to figure out what it means, reading it aloud, copying characters, etc. to learn the language. The important thing is just that you keep dealing with the language as often as possible and get some feedback on your work ot make sure you are learning things properly.

Haha, I guess things are about as clear as mud now. I feel like I could just keep talking about learning Chinese for a long time but not really make any more sense ... oh well. I hope I at least partially answered your question.