How can I make progress?

Hi Caju, yes we have all been there - and many of us actually succeeded to move on to the next plateau ;) Seriously: So far I have not found a mythical technique for learning Chinese. The trick is simply to keep going. Find fun in learning the language. You have come to the right for that. Besides the abundance of material and the support of the staff, I found the CPod community extremely valuable to push me forward, especially when encountering motivational problems. The community keeps you in a constant "China mood". Regarding the materials I would recommend that you additionally work with one level above your head - challenge yourself and you find that you move ahead faster. Also: Maximize input. The more Chinese you listen to, the better. Listen to the Dialogues and The Fix whereever and whenever you can - on auto-repeat. Only that way you get the flow. If you can afford it, you should also think about interspersing your studies with the Chinesepod "PracticePlan", because there you receive professional one-to-one-training to improve communication skills. What I learned late and the hard way: Learning the characters is crucial, although opionions here differ on when to start. I personally recommend to begin learning them as early as possible. They will help you a lot later when you encounter the magical "Elementry-Intermediate gap", where you need to build up high volumes of vocab knowledge. Unfortunately, there are not many ressources here for that particular part of the language here yet, but the community might help, e.g.: http://chinesepod.com/connections/viewpost/Frank/connect/Great+guide+for+learning+the+characters%21 Regarding grammar on the other hand I personally would wait a while. Now that I am on a confident Intermediate level, grammar rules become very valuable, but I doubt they would have helped me much earlier. I got the impression that Chinese is to be a lot more "feeling-driven" than "grammar-driven", with lots of implicit rules that are only difficult to grasp without lots of precding input. Hope to see you here more often!

Just like you I had an interest in Mandarin for some time before finding Cpod and I tried out various things but after finding Cpod I haven't really used any other resources. I came here at the end of June and started with the newbie lessons and having plenty of time to listen during the summer I started adding elementary lessons on by August. As Henning says the best thing is to listen, listen and listen. Also the newbie and elementary lessons actually use a limited range of words and if you subscribe and have access to the vocabulary you can use that to build up your own vocabulary. Ken always keeps talking about hearing more examples of how a certain frase or word is used and if you click on the little plus sign next to a word it will open up and show you other lessons where it has been used. I often do this to find 'new' lessons while I wait for new lessons to come out. I second what Henning said about characters but I only learn how to read them for now. Sometimes trying to do too much at once will hinder your learning and if your goal is listening and speaking skills I would recommend waiting with the handwriting skills. Some people do a lot of memorization of characters and opinions are divided on how best to learn them but I think most of us do use flashcards at least once in a while. One trick that I've found very helpful is to learn the characters in words. Many flashcard programs only allows you to revise single characters and gives you all the meanings of the characters but as a newbie it easily becomes too much and confusing. Learning the meaning of 中国 or 物业 is often more helpful than learning the many meanings of 中 or 物. I guess what I'm trying to say is that I find it easier to learn Mandarin doing it like a jigsaw puzzle where you find all the red pieces first and put them together, then you discover that some of them has some yellow and some red on them and you connect them with the all yellow pieces on them and soon you start to see a picture emerging...

henning & lunetta - Thanks! Your suggestions are just what I am looking for. The experiences of true poddies who have made real progress is encouraging and insightful. Lunetta, you mentioned flashcard programs. Are you speaking of an internal CPod program, or some other one? I probably recognize about 20 characters, so I definetly need help in that area. How are you guys able to enter Chinese characters in the midst of your typed text?

Find what part of Mandarin learning you love, and whether or not it's "good for you", just do it. It's OK, nobody's watching, let yourself indulge freely. Keep on doing it. Overdose on it, you're allowed to, and it won't give you pimples. And when you don't love it any more, find another part of learning Mandarin that you really love now, and do that. Do it physically or in your mind every waking minute and dream about it all night. Don't stop until you love something else more, though it's OK if that never happens too. Whenever in life you want something you can't have, let yourself have an extra Mandarin fix instead. But never let what you do become a chore. Keep the love alive. Stop doing what you love before you start to tire of it, then it will always bring untainted joy tomorrow. There are so many parts to learning Mandarin that there will always be something fascinating that you can hardly bear to stop doing. Work in a mixed learning environment but just follow your heart and the other parts of learning Mandarin will fall in behind while you do it. For street conversations, you could learn to say something like "I'm learning Mandarin, I already know fifty words" which will help to save the other person from embarrassment. Then lead the conversation, asking the cliche questions that you know all the possible answers to. You'll find that when it comes to small talk, if you start word for word like one of the lesson dialogues, the responses are likely to be the same too, and you can have a long "conversation" which is (secretly) the same as a memorised lesson. But you always have to lead, answer a question and in the same breath ask one yourself, otherwise they can't begin to know what they can say to you that you will understand and that problem can feel very uncomfortable to them. And finally, for the best advice of all, read the other responses, there are some excellent suggestions there.

I do use the Cpod program sometimes but I prefer using ZDT (http://zdt.sourceforge.net/) as it allows me to revise by typing the pinyin and tone. It's just the way I like to do it. It also allows you to make your own flashcard sets and edit the entries which I find useful because I can remove all the more obscure meanings and concentrate on the ones frequently used. The drawback is that it can be time consuming fidling around with the copy and paste functions but for me it works. Lots of other programs are available, also for Palm Pilots and cell phones but I don't really know much about those. I bet there's a thread on the Cpod Forum and maybe some of the more tech savvy around here (you know who you are!) have some suggestions.

caju, Life is a journey, not a destination. Have patience. Keep yourself in the "China mood" as henning says. There are some people who have the drive, the time, and the God given talent to master a language fairly quickly but for the rest of us it takes about ten years. Relax and Enjoy the trip :)

Lots of good tips and insights posted here. This is a link I think I've posted before, but as it is such a good short article, it deserves to be posted again: Advice for Beginners http://www.chinese-forums.com/showthread.php?t=5204