Why I chose to learn Mandarin

In 2006 I decided to learn a second language as I wanted a mental challenge and to experiance a different culture. I also wanted a language that was widely used (to ensure opportunity to practice) and a language that may be useful to my career.

In 2006 I decided to learn a second language as I wanted a mental challenge and to experiance a different culture. I also wanted a language that was widely used (to ensure opportunity to practice) and a language that may be useful to my career.

I ended up researching more about Japanease, Cantonese and Mandarin. After listening to some samples of each I dropped Japanease, I had been told that Japanease has a lot of sounds that sound almost the same to a westener. As far as I was concerned this seemed to be true, I found it easier to pick out individual sounds from the Canotonese and Mandarin sentances (not very scientific but there you go).

I discovered that although I was likely to find more Cantonese speakers in England (particularly with the Hong Kong connection), Mandarin was the official language of China and spoken by many more people, with more materials on the Internet. The final clincher was that Cantonese has more tones than Mandarin (I guessed I was going to have trouble with these so the fewer tones the better).

That is how I settled on Mandarin, my reasons may not stand up to detailed analysis (how many of our big decisions do?) but they are reasons, and now I was committed to learning Mandarin.

Media choice

This is simply a place-holder page that I have back-dated to hold old media choices. The full page contains links to the media.

Please note this page has been abandoned. My media choices can now be found in my delicious media choice links.

A short documentary on Chinese online game players, obtaining items in the virtual game world to sell for profit in the real world. Thought provoking, the Chinese is hard but very interesting (also subtitles).

A tongue in cheek, mini-film. A Jewish girl reflects on the prospects of finding a partner in Beijing. She interviews a number of people to find out where she is going wrong (I wonder if she is really single?). This is the first of a series and a number of other interesting videos can be found at Danwei TV

One of a number of videos coming out of China-8. I don't think these guys will be direct competion for Chinesepod but the vids are a little interesting. The content is mostly reinforcement for me at the moment but there are a few choice snippets of information I latched onto. I hope these guys find their niche. If there is one problem with this one it is the wind noise although I like that as need more practice picking up non-clear (ie normal ;)) Chinese.

Great stuff, good to see people getting stuck into Mandarin :)