Become fluent in Mandarin Chinese

I am unfortunately lost in the matter of learning Chinese. I suppose I’ll start with Pimsleur and pronunciation, then move on to other things. Hopefully kanji study will make Chinese easier in the writing aspect, but I’m particularly worried about tones. It’s bad enough that Thai tones confuse the hell out of me. So wish me luck~

I have my second tutoring session tomorrow. I don’t want to go. Our lesson will be about travel. I don’t have a textbook to study from. She just sends me a list of questions in traditional characters. I’m expected to study them and be able to discuss them. Ugh. I was so excited about the first session, but that was a few weeks ago. It’s hard to get motivated to study and catch up on everything I’ve forgotten.

Now that I’m no longer living in China and hitting the books, I’m rapidly forgetting it. I hope to find a Chinese teacher in Korea who can help me continue learning, though. Besides, I’ve heard that the Korean language uses a lot of Chinese characters, so that will help.

During graduate school, I had many good friends who were either Taiwanese-Americans or Chinese. I envied their ability to converse in what seemed such an incomprehensible language in addition to their proficiency in ordering food in restaurants. I cannot say how many times I sat back and let my friends do the dealings with waiters and waitresses, after already having been briefed on the dishes by my friends.

More seriously, their friendships spawned an active interest in Chinese culture and the Chinese language itself. When I learned of the simplicity of Chinese grammar (absence of verb tenses and noun genders), I was impressed by its potential efficiency. Chinese characters, however, represented what I thought (and still think) to be a terribly difficult and inefficient basis for written language. I remember remarking to my Chinese-speaking friends that I consider it a testament to the Chinese people to have had such a long-lived, prosperous, and inventive culture despite the magnitude of shear memorization individuals must go through to become literate. I mean, how much of their brains are devoted to memorizing characters and connecting their meanings and sounds?

I took a community college course in Mandarin prior to law school. I found it very interesting, but incredibly challenging. Due to the difficulty of the language, the cursory nature of the course (which only met for five hours a week), the slowness of the class, and my own distraction with working full-time, I never felt like I learned that much. At the end of the course, I was not really able to speak and could only read VERY limited texts due to my tiny character vocabulary. I did, however, enjoy the language, and would still like to find the time and means to take it on.

I have been studying Mandarin for about 8 months. I have an understanding of the basics, but I need to put more time in to become proficent. 10,000 characters so little time!