Homestudy Resources and Advice

Hi-

I just registered here, and am not sure where this belongs, so I appologize if it is in the incorrect area.

Anyhow, I very much want to learn how to speak Mandarin. At present I speak English (obviously), and am learning Spanish.

Houever, I as of now speak absolutly none whatsoever. And, what is worse, Is that I live in a somewhat disconected area (Small Town In Southern U.S.), so I have literaly no access to anyone who speaks Mandarin, and I have as of yet found no books that are much help. Also, I have been looking for a little while for a place online to learn, but I have not found a satisfactory one yet. I looked at some of the links on this site, but a lot seem to assume you have some knowledge of the languge, and I am unfortunatly, quite confused...

So, can someone please advise me on what I should do to learn this? Where (online) can I learn, are there any easy to find/cheap books I can order to help? What should I start on? Basicly, how can I learn Mandarin, with no knowledge of it, and save the internet, probably no access to any helpful source...?

Thank You-

-And again, my apologies if this is in the wrong section.

Would these help you start? ->

BBC - Real Chinese

Conversational Mandarin Chinese Online by Tianwei Xie

I was in the relatively same scenario roughly a month ago, and I've had some success developing a routine to start learning mandarin at home. Nothing will ever be as good as actually taking lessons from a fluent speaker, I think, but here's what I've done.

1. I picked up The Rosetta Stone - Mandarin. It's expensive, but most intensive learn-at-home programs are, and it will literally take a lot of time and a lot of hard work to complete the first unit.

Because the program is immersion-based, there is no English whatsoever--you have to infer quite a bit, which can sometimes be difficult. So:

2. Use the adso engine to make sure you completely understand the different characters that are making up the various phrases you learn during the program.

I also picked up William McNaughton's Reading and Writing Chinese, explicitly to practice characters. I go through his list and study five or so a day. The list isn't at all in-line with the Rosetta Stone program, but it is an interesting way to see how characters are built, because the low-stroke-count characters are presented first, and then used to create the characters that come later. It definately helps understand how different characters are created with other characters or with radicals.

Last, (3), I use a horde of online resources. Here are some but not all:

http://www.usc.edu/dept/ealc/chinese/newweb/character_page.html
http://zhongwen.com/
http://www.ocrat.com/

AJ