The Learning Chinese Craze 18 Sept 2008 Updates

Two articles about some positive things happening on the Learning Chinese front:
Indiana University gets a $1million grant for Chinese language programs
A Taiwanese-American sets up a private Chinese school for children in Alabama

How Long Does it Take to Learn Fluent Mandarin?

A lot of people ask me how long it takes to learn to speak and read fluent Mandarin.
To answer this question, let’s first define fluency in Chinese:

Speaking: You can easily hold your own in any conversation. There may be some vocabulary words you don’t understand, but that seldom occurs and is not really a barrier [...]

Learn Chinese the Fun Way: Play Nintendo!

This link is just too good not to pass along: Nintendo DS Review: My Chinese Coach
How the program is set up (from the article):
After an initial assessment, players are placed among the 29 lessons. The game has minimum requirements for lesson advancement, which eventually build to a huge amount – approximately 1000 lessons, 10,000 words [...]

Speaking Chinese with Accurate Tones

It isn’t easy for non-native speakers of Mandarin to pronounce words correctly, though many of them eventually master the basic sounds after studying pinyin and putting in hundreds of hours of speaking practice.
What many “fluent” speakers of Mandarin can’t manage is getting the tones right. There are a suprising number of non-native Mandarin speakers who [...]