News Flash - Mandarin is difficult to learn!

I feel validated! This week's issue of TimeAsia features several articles about learning Mandarin, which they say is one of the five most difficult languages to learn (the other four are Arabic, Cantonese, Japanese and Korean). It is a very interesting issue and is available online at: TimeAsia June 26, 2006. The thing that sticks in my head most is that it takes 2,200 class hours for the average English speaker to reach proficiency in Mandarin. So, at one class hour per week, we will be proficient in 2048!

One of the other articles was about study aids. I think I mentioned before that we are using Cheng & Tsui Integrated Chinese, which is pretty good - there's a link under "Favorite Shopping Links" to the right - but what we really wanted were flash cards and nothing we found seemed quite right. So, I decided to make flash cards for all the vocabulary words from the first three chapters (everything we've covered so far). I'm happy with the way they turned out and I think I might have learned a couple of characters in the process of making them!