I want to take an online course for Chinease. Here’s the thing, I’m starting high school next year, I live in Florida, and my parents don’t think I can do it. So, I have no use. But I REALLY want to. I hear it’s hard, yet I don’t care. I want to learn it. So I’m going to read your blog and pray I will be aloud to try it.

As for the characters, there are many fancy applications out there to help, but all you really need is pen and paper. Learn the proper stroke order of 50-100 characters and you’re pretty much good to go for self-study.
Go through textbooks, articles, or books – depending on your level – and go at a pace of 10-20 new words (not new characters) per day. Make index cards or a list of these words. Each day, cover the English or Chinese side of the list and review. Mark words you couldn’t remember. Review those words again, then review marked words everyday until you know them. Each word should take only a couple seconds to review, so in 10 minutes, you should be able to review several days’ worth of words.

Next, keep a separate list for the new words that contain new characters. When reviewing, cover the English or Pinyin side and write each word out once from memory. (Yes! Just once!) Mark the words you don’t remember and write them out three times.

You may find that you cannot remember every word/character perfectly after one day of study. After several days, though, you will remember – and without writing each character +10 times and forgetting it after 3 days.

If you use a similar procedure for any language, you can One) in three years (at 10 words per day) develop a vocabulary of comperable size to that of a native speaker, and Two) retain this vocabulary due to the intense level of review.

The whole program takes about 30 minutes per day. This is, of course, fairly intense and can be cut down depending on your needs. If you do not need to develop such a large vocabulary in such a short period, then learn five new words per day.

Also, you will find that you will learn enough characters by concentrating on learning vocabulary. After all, knowledge of the two characters that make up a word do not always mean you know what the word means. It is more meaningful to learn the actual word.

Lastly, you may decide to take some time off and go to China to study Chinese. You will progress much faster and in one year, you will achieve a proficient level.

http://www.usc.edu/dept/ealc/chinese/character/alpha/index.htm

and this one if you want to learn how to listen to and say the sounds correctly using the 4 tones:

http://www.quickmandarin.com/chinesepinyintable/pinyintable_vertical.php

Let me know how it goes and if you have any ideas.

Am I correct in understanding that you put the ZDT software together. If you did, I’d like to ask you a few questions.

Love and peace

Not too sure about ZDT yet…just downloaded 0.7.0 and not quite sure where to get started. However, I have found some other exciting sites and together I am sure I’ll be able to achieve my goal.

Love and peace