[bobjordan]

I've lived in China 5 years now and our skill levels are comparable so I'm pretty impressed. It's really just basic conversation but the Chinese people will love him for getting this far with it. This along with move to join Tsinghua board will create massive goodwill for FB.

[nogridbag]

oh man, this doesn't give me much hope. I'm visiting China next fall and was hoping I could have a good handle on the basics by then. I'm learning via Pimsleur and right now I can only say strange phrases like "Would you like to go to the hotel with me?" and "How much money?" I'm joking slightly, I've learned a little bit more than that. But I swear Pimsleur targets their lessons at single men trying to meet foreigners.

[hawkice]

So, my thing about Pimsleur is that I assume they intend for you to supplement it. For instance, given what you've learned already, you can probably say, "I would like to order two beers." but CANNOT, if you rely solely on Pimsleur, say "I would like to order seven beers." Because they teach you some sentences and what they mean but don't teach you basics.

Languages are vast oceans of meaning and composition -- 90 hours simply is not enough for Chinese (or any language, really, reality itself is too complex to describe with a system that simple).

I'd recommend learning the characters using Heisig's Remembering the Hanzi (this should take about 100-200 hours), and then shifting to HSK (which should be pretty easy post-character learning) + full sentences.

If you like Pimsleur, keep with it, although I get made fun of for sounding like a northerner a bit from using it for pronunciation help when I was beginning. :)

[nandemo]

> I assume they intend for you to supplement it.

That is true, but it provides a pretty good foundation. Most other methods don't focus enough on listening and pronunciation.

> "I would like to order two beers." but CANNOT, if you rely solely on Pimsleur, say "I would like to order seven beers."

That doesn't match my experience with Pimsleur. Have you completed a Pimsleur course?

I've done Hebrew and I'm now doing Arabic. Pretty much every new sentence is used as a template and repeated with multiple variations. E.g. in Arabic, numbers are inflected, and they teach you that right in the first unit. So if you know how to say "two beers" then you know how to say "seven beers". It's definitely not an audio version of a phrasebook.

> I get made fun of for sounding like a northerner

Being made fun for sounding like a native is a win on my book!

[hawkice]

Hahaha so, not sounding like a native so much as adding r sounds everywhere, which makes you sound a little silly in the south independent of how good you are. Imagine a four year old speaking in a southern drawl here in America, it'd sound pretty odd. See wikipedia's: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erhua

My comment about those two sentences is specifically applicable to people who have done the first dozen or so lessons of Pimsleur's Mandarin Chinese I, which literally contains the sentence "I would like to order two beers" but doesn't cover the numbers until... not sure, I learned the numbers on my own and was liable to have skipped that part if it came later, but I don't remember them in Pimsleur at all.

[27182818284]

I remember reading that he was spending an hour a night on this years ago. (I wish I could remember more) but the key being "years" sticks in my mind, yeah.