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

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!