Hello! I am a China lover who has （哎哟） never been to China. I love reading about 老外 experiences living and working in China. I have read a few, including Kirsty Needham's A Season in Red: my great leap forward into the new China, a fun memoir of an Australian working for a stint at the China Daily, and the American Rachel DeWoskin's Foreign Babes in Beijing. Does anyone out there have their own favorite books to share about cultural collision in contemporary China?

What do you recommend for a person living in the United States and learning Chinese for personal growth and does not expect to ever travel to China or do business with any Chinese companies. Most or all of the conversation would be for pleasure with Chinese Americans or other Chinese language students. Reading would be the local Chinese papers or restaurant menus and any opportunity to speak the language would probably be in Chinese restaurants or in the Chinese markets, culture centers or  China town. I took one semester of Mandarin Chinese and the instructor seemed adamant that we learn both simplified and traditional and at the time didn't seem so overwhelming in a classroom setting. However the class was cancelled after  the one semester and learning both styles on my own has become rather tedious. I am just wondering if I should buckle down and keep learning to read and write both or if it would be a better use of my time and energy to concentrate on one or the other, and if so which would be smartest given my current interest in learning. I noticed that the lessons give .pdf in both simplified and traditional so it is apparent that even after more than 50 years of simplified coming to be that traditional stills seems to have some place in Chinese language. Does anyone have any practical experience as if both are important or should one study just one or the other. And if I were to ever have an opportunity to visit some part of China would I be kicking my self for not studying both or find that I wasted my time studying both? What about school children in China, do they still learn both or is it just simplified? Are there other regions that do not recognize simplified besides Taiwan? 

     I have somewhat of a problem. When I first started on Chinesepod, I didn't know any written Chinese. This made the process of finding Chinese words I didn't know quite easy. Now, when going through the newbie lessons, I find that either I can read almost everything, or at least understand the words in a sentence.

     Because of this 'problem', it is taking me quite a while to find new vocabulary words to learn. I wish the speaking part was going as well. What I have done is moved to the elementary level for new words, where I can find abundant words that I don't know. This solution is working for now, but I suspect that I will begin to find the same problem with the elementary words as well. I guess what I would like to know is if there are any vocabulary lists someplace where I can just add words without having to comb through all these lessons.

I've just discovered something that has never crossed my mind about learning Chinese.

Last week, my friend bought me a Chinese book for my birthday - it's all written with characters and no pinyin.  Initially I thought "awesome - it's about time I paid some attention to hanzi".  After all the excitment of opening presents, I turned my attention to understanding what the characters on the front cover said, so I grabbed my Chinese dictionary and was immediately shocked to realise something I've never considered before about learning Chinese - how do you look up characters in a dictionary if you don't even know the pinyin to begin with?

I am actually quite shocked that I've not considered this before.

How do I even begin to look words up in a Chinese dictionary when I've only got the characters and have no idea what the pinyin is?  Is there any simple way of doing this?  How do Chinese people do this?

Thought you guys might find this interesting:

always a step ahead of other British papers in terms of media, the UK's Guardian is now providing a Chinese translation of its articles that pertain to China.

Might be of some use to you advanced readers, or for those us of less skill who just want to pick out some useful vocab. All the translated articles are provided in both Chinese and English. 

Enjoy!

Here's a link to a new Chinese reading project developed by Cynthia Ning (University of Hawaii) and Michael Everson (University of Iowa) and managed through the National (U.S.) Foreign Language Resourse Center.

From the website:

Funded by the U.S. Department of Education, these Read Chinese materials were developed to provide online e-learning reading lessons aimed at beginning and intermediate students of the language.

The materials respond to a rapidly growing interest in Chinese language study among American secondary school students. Using a variety of topics selected to interest high school students, the materials also reflect the national standards established for Chinese by the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages, as well as the latest principles in online instructional design. The materials may be easily used by individual learners studying on their own or by teachers assigning them for individual or group study.

Each lesson is available in both the Simplified characters used now in the People's Republic of China and in the Traditional "Full-Form" characters that are still used in Taiwan, in Singapore, and many overseas Chinese communities.

I just got this great book by Allison & Laurence Matthews, "Learning Chinese Characters."  It helps you learn/memorize the first 800 characters you need to get through HSK level A.  It uses mnemonic stories to help you remember the characters.  I'm through three chapters, about 40 characters, I am doing better remembering than I thought possible.  It is published by Tuttle and cost $20 from Amazon.

I wish I had it a year ago.

I just got this great book by Allison & Laurence Matthews, "Learning Chinese Characters."  It helps you learn/memorize the first 800 characters you need to get through HSK level A.  It uses mnemonic stories to help you remember the characters.  I'm through three chapters, about 40 characters, I am doing better remembering than I thought possible.  It is published by Tuttle and cost $20 from Amazon.

I wish I had it a year ago.