learning chinese

Hey everyone,

apart from talking to people who know chinese, what's the best way to learn it?  Would any of you recommend the Rossetta Stone series?  I'm talking about Mandarin btw

For greater success of Anon!

A little bit more than 6 months. I had almost no knowledge of the language prior to that. The material I used was mostly acquired from torrent websites and P2P softwares, I only paid for a few books that were available on the internet for free anyway, but it was cheaper for me to buy the books than to print them.

My father forced me to take German classes a while ago and I don't feel I learned anything in 2 months, and I went there 3h a day. These classes were completely boring and the way of teaching was primitive and innefective. Many researches are done in the field of linguistics, yet classrooms don't seem to apply these and instead keep using the same method over and over, without evolving.

Self-teaching is better because you can choose what fits your needs the best and you can choose what kind of material you want to listen to instead of being imposed boring material.

In a classroom, you will keep hearing other non-native speakers trying to speak in the target language. With self-teaching, you will hear edited recordings of native speakers, which will help you speak with a better accent.

I could go on and on. To sum it up, I think classes are ineffective methods if you compare the ratio time spent / things learned learned and also money spent / things learned/