mandarin

what are some good resources for a native english speaker to learn mandarin? i have pimsleur, but it obviously doesnt help with simplified chinese. i'm going to china for an indefinite period soon (too soon to be fluent), and would like a head start

The internet... k... also this little bugger: NJSTAR CHINESE WP google it.

你好吗？我很好。我叫美林。我是中国人和讲中文。
Nihao ma? Wo hen hao. Wo jiao Mei-lin. Wo shi zhong-guo-ren he jiang zhong-wen.

How are you? I'm fine. My name is (I am called) Mei-lin. I am Chinese and I speak Chinese.

That took me about 5mins to memorize chinese sentence structure is very similar to that of English. Learn the characters and you'll be on your way.

(From someone who started studying about a month ago)