Mandarin

Does anyone have any experience learning Mandarin? Any tips?

I tried for a while before deciding I could care less about it right now
But the Michel Thomas course is good, and can be found on torrents. Spoken Mandarin is actually quite easy (the tones aren't hard either), it's the written part that's hard. I could give you the links to some books for learning the Hanzi that I've heard good reviews about (and tried one, it's pretty good).

Hey, thanks for the reply. I'm mainly looking at spoken but I guess I will have to learn written at some point. It really doesn't help that I have a poor ear for notes.

>>3
Listen to a shit ton of Chinese, you'll get used to the sounds eventually.

>>2

Thanks so much for the tip on the course. I'm finding it amazing!

>>5
Good
Assimil also has a Chinese course, but I'm not sure on the quality, I know there courses in European languages are great though. You should be able to find the Chinese on torrent...Do you speak any other languages?

>>6
Thanks, I'm looking for the Assimil one now. I only speak English so this is my first try at learning another language.

>>7
Cool
Good luck man

>>8
Thanks, I'm quietly confident now. Just one more question: I've tried listening to a few local Mandarin news broadcasts to see if I could recognise anything yet, but they seem really fast. Is there a better resource for listening or does it just click after a while?

>>9
Try and find some ebooks or recordings of people speaking and slow it down in Audacity or another program. I'm learning Spanish and those people talk fast as fuck, but listening to slow recordings help.