I know, because I’ve tried before. My name is Chris and I’m a Chinese-American who didn’t really get interested in learning Chinese until I graduated from college. I took some classes at a local community college for a year and I learned quite a bit. I also developed this piece of software called ZDT to help me with my studies. The program has a small following and I worked on it for a few of years. However, when I moved out on my own, it was no longer convenient for me to take classes anymore, so I had to start learning Chinese on my own. As you may have figured out, learning another language by yourself requires quite a bit of discipline, which I didn’t have at the time. So over the last couple of years, life started to intervene, and I slowly stopped studying my Mandarin.

Fast forward to the present day. I’m not quite sure why I want to start up learning again. I think I felt bad because I have been very slow to respond to requests by people emailing me about ZDT related things. I didn’t really have a desire to add new features or fix bugs in ZDT while I wasn’t using the program myself.

So I’ve decided to start up this blog to help people learn Mandarin. I know there are a ton of great new online chinese learning resources out there now that should make learning chinese a lot easier. There’s also a lot of not so good resources as well, so I would like to start trying all these things out and sharing my experiences with them. By doing so, I hope to get myself motivated again to start studying again. Once I do that, I’ll probably start working on finishing the next version of ZDT. My goal is to become fluent in Mandarin in one years time. I hope I can help you guys on the way as well.