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In all seriousness, give us a shot: http://popupchinese.com http://popupchinese.com We're a Beijing startup and are changing the face of Chinese language inst

In all seriousness, give us a shot: http://popupchinese.com http://popupchinese.com We're a Beijing startup and are changing the face of Chinese language instruction. If characters are causing problems just switch everything to pinyin. We've got a huge variety of shows and tests and speaking drills and are getting rave reviews. There are lots of issues with traditional educational methods. In my personal opinion the biggest is that traditional classroom-based methods of teaching languages fail spectacularly with Chinese because they end up focusing on the written text which has only a weak phonetic link to the spoken language.

shiranaihito 18y ago
Well, I took my beginner's course in Chinese in 2000.. I gave up on it around 2002, and have since moved on to learning Japanese up to daily conversation level, and now I'm considering taking a look at Korean. > methods of teaching languages fail spectacularly with Chinese because they end up focusing on the written text which has only a weak phonetic link to the spoken language. From my experience, I'd say that this is a good point. Our teacher made us (try to) draw those Chinese characters quite a bit, and it didn't really help me at all. There was no way I was going to remember those scary things that soon. My Chinese studies were spread out over two years and two courses, and I only remember a few simple sentences. Only one of them happens to be relevant now: "Wo you yi ge gongzi" (+tones) - I own a company. :P A sole proprietorship, to be exact, but technically a company anyway!