In my effort to study mandarin better, I wrote out some sentences. These sentences try to use some of the ideas we learned in Qing Wen (shi4...de, ...bi3..., you3 shen2me..., lian2....dou1 as well as the travel lessons.  I know some of them are totally wrong, but I would greatly appreciate any kind of help in correcting what is wrong with what I wrote.  Especially helpful is knowing why it's wrong.  Forgive me, but I don't really know characters, and my pinyin is not that great, but any help is appreciated.

I'm going to complain.

Wo3 shi4 yao4 qu4 tou2su4 de.

When did you file a compliant?

Ni3 shi4 shen2me shi2hou4 tou2su4 de?

I usually don't set up these kinds of meetings. They're too important.

Wo3 yi1ban4 bu4 an1pai2 zhe4 zhong3 hui.  Ta1men2 shi4 tai2 zhong3 yao4 de.

This road is under construction.

Zhe4 tiao2 lu4 shi4 zai4 xiu1 de.

No one can afford to speak irresponsibly.

Mei2 you3 ren2 bu4 yao4 luan4shuo1 de qi3

Hi everybody.  I'm new to this group.  Anyway...

As part of my studying strategy, I want to practice answering prefabricated questions such as these questions made for ESL students.  The problem is, I don't know of any lists of Mandarin questions out there.  Is anyone aware of such a list?

Thanks a bunch.

If you're a new subscriber, and wondering where to start in learning Mandarin, I have some suggetions.  These suggestions are tailored to a person ACTUALLY HEADING TO CHINA FOR A YEAR.  If you a hobbyist and merely interested in a place to begin to hone ideas on your own starting point, this might also be a good post to read.

BACKGROUND

My approach has been is to treat learning mandarin as a 3 credit course at a university.  Once you're here in China, you'll realize how unprepared you are, and wish you'd PRIORITIZED LEARNING CHINESE higher among your many daily tasks, instead of looking/feeling like a babe lost in the woods all the time once you're here.
 
As part of the self study thing, i'm thinking that ideally, I would love to be "fluent" in mandarin by the time my CPOD subscription runs out in Sept 30,2010.  "Fluent" is defined as having working knowledge of around 5000 words/phrases.  5000 words/phrases was arrived at somewhat arbitrarily, and is certainly arguable why 5000 words/phrases isn't better that 6000, 7000 or even 10,000 words/phrases,  but it's a decent metric to start for the following reasons:
 
-5000 words is about 100 words a week for a year.  I've thought 100 words/week  was a lot, and in practice, i'm running at maybe the 20-30 words/phrases per week on average (this is what happens when you have a full time job with 2 pre-schoolers around).
- I'm told that you need knowledge of about 2000 characters in order to read a Chinese newspaper and get most of the gist of the articles (certainly more characters is better, but this might be a reasonable mimimum).  i'm hoping that 5000 words gets me to that level.
 
I have an engineering background, and one of the things you're taught is to break up big tasks into smaller ones.  "BE FLUENT IN MANDARIN" is a big task.  Learn 100 words a week is a smaller task. Learn 20 words a week sounds almost easy (until you try it). 

YOU'RE ON THE GROUND.....

.... At Beijing Capital International Airport (or Shanghai Pudong, or Shenzhen BaoAn or whatever entry point).  After having received your passport back from the consulate/embassy, bought your tickets, got your guide book, maybe even bought some renminbi. You board the airplane, giddy with excitement and anticipation. 10-14 hours later, you land, go through customs, and then you see the signs for drivers picking up paying tourists, they're screaming, yelling, people coming up to you saying in bad english, "you need taxi?" "where you go?", the written text is in English and Mandarin, and then you
realize, what the %$@#*&% do I do now?

CURRICULUM

This is the part where I continually tweak, but here goes

download taxi lessons. i'll put the links for the best ones shortly.

LISTEN to the lessons FIRST.  (I'm using caps to get your attention). Do not bother with the pdfs at this point.  download to your iPod/Zune (i dare to be different).  At this point, you'll need to anchor your intuition about Mandarin through listening to it.  Mandarin, as you already suspect and know, is really different from English (i'm a native English speaker, and an American one at that, so forgive my biases/metaphors/etc...). LISTENING TO THE PODCASTS FIRST starts you on the path toward learning the mandarin pronunciation quickly. 

More posts to add. Will do shortly

We all love to hate 'em. Here's my new strategy for learning measure words:

1: Whenever I add a new noun to my vocabulary list, I look it up on nciku. Usually, there are measure word colloquations there. Hopefully, there's just one.

2: If it's a measure word I haven't already studied, I add it to the vocab.

3: Since the pinyin field in the vocab list is editable (thank you, ChinesePod!), I add the measure word there. This is because in StudyArcade, which is the iPhone app I use to study vocabulary, both directions (C->E and E->C) have the pinyin on the answer side.

This is based on the classic approach of learning gender in gender based languages. You don't learn "'voiture' means 'car'", you learn "'la voiture' means 'the car'", since this gives you the gender for free. The same way, when learning Chinese, don't learn "'zhǐ' means 'paper'", learn "'yī zhāng zhǐ' means 'a piece of paper'".

Problems with this approach:

1: The Chinese field of the vocab is not editable, which makes it impossible to do it the way I want to do it (adding the character of the measure word in the Chinese field and the pinyin in the pinyin field). Also, no "Convert to tone marks" button is availible in the pinyin editing field, but that's easily worked around.

2: Sometimes there are multiple measure word colloquations.

So what I'm looking for in this discussion is both your own ways of learning the measure words, and if you have a solution to any of my problems (like, what should I do when there are several measure words for a noun?). I'll be interested in reading your thoughts.