Another note on Learning Chinese

Gotta dig the new autosave feature.
Learning Mandarin is FUN!
I love it. I can totally see myself using mandarin as my primary language. It feels like I should have been born speaking it. I'm just finding it so natural and easy it's incredible.
Apparently most people find it quite easy to learn to speak it but have a hard time writing it so maybe I'll be changing my tune once I really get into the writing. Whatever. I love it so far. So rich, so poetic. I always thought that English was the best language to write poetry in (probably because the only other languages I knew, French and Latin, are entirely unsuited to poetry), but now that I've caught a glimpse of Mandarin (standardized Beijing dialect) I can totally see myself writing poetry in Chinese.
I've been photoreading a Chinese/English dictionary, a couple books on grammar, and I'm constantly listening to vocabulary and pronunciation CDs. I'm also looking for some soap operas in Mandarin cuz I read on the learningstrategies.com forum that soaps are a good way to begin immersion. So if anyone knows where I can find some mandarin soaps I'd really love to know. I'm not sure at this point how to make it worth your while but I'm sure we'll find something.

A Note About Learning Chinese

So I went ahead and started learning Chinese. I wanted to get a couple things done first so that I could fully immerse myself in the language without other obligations but when I saw how many books there were at the library I couldn't resist.

So I've got some vocabulary playing softly in the background right now, I'll be PhotoReading a Chinese/English dictionary every day, and watching a bunch of Chinese movies and shows. I'll start with ones that have subtitles then move on to ones that don't after a little while.

I tried immersing myself in the same way when I learned Latin but Latin audio and video resources are hard to come by. I was able to find a couple things and I played them constantly for a while which seemed to help quite a bit but I think a more thorough immersion will be better.

So if you're lookin to learn a new language and would like some ideas I got tons.

On top of what I already mentioned you could try some rhythmic memorization of vocabulary. It's a technique I learned from "Accelerated Learning for the 21st Century".
What you do is you pick out a musical piece from a list of specially chosen classical composers. (I can send you the list if you want, just leave a comment asking for it or subscribe and I'll send it to you). Then as you're listening to the piece recite your list of vocabulary words to the rhythm of the music. When you're done let the words incubate for a while (just let them sit in your mind without trying to recall them), preferably about 24hours. Then you recite them in a normal tone (without rhythm) while listening to another piece of classical music (from a different list. I can share that list as well).
I haven't tried this technique yet but it seems like it would work. I'll give it a shot and report back to you. Hopefully all goes well.

I'm also planning on doing some creative problem solving using Image Streaming (Genius Code) on how to better learn Chinese so if I come up with some good stuff I'll post it all here.

Be FREE!!