What (or how) is the fastest way to learn how to speak Mandarin Chinese?
It is possible to teach yourself, believe it or not. I started out with ‘Modern Chinese: A Basic Course’ by The Faculty of Peking University. It’s put out by Dover and has a CD with native speakers, both male and female, to accompany the text. Quite old, so kind of ‘communist’, but describes the sound system in detail, gives you a good foundation for the grammar – the basic sentence patterns. And a nice book on the writing system: Teach Yourself Beginner’s Chinese Script, put out by Teach Yourself Books. Later on, I found a very nice (and free!) course on the Internet. Here’s the URL: www.hanyu.com.cn/en/default.asp This will give you more modern vocabulary, how to use it in conversation. Also if you want you can learn Chinese characters, they have very nice animations which slowly take you through each character, like an invisible hand drawing them for you so you know the order and direction of the strokes (every detail IS important – if you don’t get it right and you learn with the w
