Eileen and I bought several books about Mandarin Chinese yesterday.

This book has only pinyin
or romanizaed characters
in it. We bought one
of these for each
of us. I don’t think
I have enough days
between now and
our trip to do too much
learning. But I am
combining it with
some other books
we bought

like:
This book teaches
both vocab and
characters.
It teaches
and emphasizes
practicing writing
characters.
It
starts
with numbers
which are pretty easy.

Also bought this one

It’s really quite good
and I am thinking it
might be one to
bring along.

It has been designed
for the absolute
language beginner.

This morning I
got up and practiced.
I have about ten
characters and
compounds I am
trying to remember
at this point.

My goal is not be stupified in another country. Not sure about learning how to communicate very much in such a short time. Actually I am pretty sure I can’t learn too much in that way. But I like being as aware as I can of what’s going on around me and having some sort of a context.

So I am about half way through a history of China (China: A New History by Kingsford mentioned before) and doing a bit of surfing of pronunciation web sites. There are a lot of them.

I found a memory game this morning that just works with numbers. Pretty cool.