Going to china in 5 weeks.,.....

deedeedesire, no. There is probably no place on earth where you can learn Chinese in 5 weeks. But you should be able to pick up a lot of relevant expressions at ChinesePod, e.g. for greeting, thanking, asking for the toilet etc. And congratulations on your tour to China. Sounds great! Have fun!

I think language learning comes in quanta. There is a big difference between knowing nothing and knowing a few basic phrases. After a couple years of study, I enviously watched people who only knew a few words get around about as well as I could. You won't be able to have a meaningful conversation after five weeks study, but you'll get something worthwhile out of it.

I agree with Henning - you can't learn Chinese in a few weeks, but learning how to greet and to ask for the bathroom is very valuable. (Just browse the newbie lessons) And, I just returned this morning from a two week vacation in China, and as a tourist the two most valuable words I used were "bu2 yao4". You will continually be pestered at all tourist areas, but with these two simple words pronounced correctly (which means "no want"), you will almost always immediately be left alone. I never even got a chance to practice saying "piss off" which I had just learned from "The Saturday Show". :) Now I just have to get out of the habit of saying bu2 yao4 to my wife :) At home, it's "bu2 yao4 le, xie4 xie4" which softens it.

I take it sputnik has been doing a lot of dancing in China?

no I haven't actually done any dancing, but did see some social dancing in the street, particularly last year when I went to Zhengzhou (FWIW, I was into acrobatic rockn'roll dancing a few years back and been known to show off a bit but don't tell anybody, the sputnik dance has become quieter over the years :-)

What's the sputnik dance? If you only have a few weeks before you travel, i'd try to get your pronunciation right. There's nothing worse than seeing tourists trying to say '厕所在哪儿？' in the most convoluted fashion.. and the locals not actually getting it. If you can read the pinyin from the phrasebook, pronounce it correctly-ish, they'll understand you and that's all you need. The thought of learning chinese in 5 weeks is incredible.

You can't learn the language in 5 weeks but you can accomplish a lot if you're diligent, and I think it would really pay off. Even if all you really absorb are a few key phrases, you earn a lot of brownie points with locals in foreign countries if they see you at least make an effort to talk to them in their own language. Your best bet is probably to look up lessons related to travel and to what you will be doing once you get there. Also it pays off to learn a few polite phrases and how to say you're sorry. Let me just add the disclaimer that I've never been to China, but I've backpacked over most of Europe and know from that experience that even a dozen phrases can go a long way in breaking the ice in some circumstances.

but dancing will help make friends there, very popular (depends what kind of dancing I guess)

goulniky, did you say you didn't have wifi in your hotel room? If so how did you connect to the internet? Looks like my wifi card for my laptop has just failed. :/

Bazza, I didn't have wifi but I had high-speed internet, I just connected through a cable 电缆 (diànlǎn) supplied by the hotel. When I first got in it didn't work 不灵 (bù líng) so I asked them to fix it 修理 (xiūlǐ) which they did by giving me a new cable. And make sure you get this piece of IE-enabling software whose name becomes 'vmusbtpgu' after some letter manipulation :-) send me a private email if you can't figure it out, I don't want to mess this site up anymore.

Actually it think it's my pc's wi-fi router that's not working, so my laptop card is probably fine.

I live somewhat in the middle of nowhere in China, so me and my friends were very surprised to go to the re-opening of a dance club in town and find that they had two foreign dancers (possibly from Russia, not sure what country).

dance in china ? for travelling or working ?

I guess the intro lessons from CPod would be a good starting point if not the full survival kit. The 1st time I went to China I had one hour of coaching a week one-on-one with an old-fashioned Chinese teacher. He had never taught Chinese, had recently arrived to Europe and picked up a book along the lines, "301 Chinese sentences" or some such, covering the basic situation, hotel, restaurant, train etc. which he made us repeat over and over again - my wife had similar sessions, and while she didn't go much further, she still remembers them to this day. And it was very effective, so much so that it got us into trouble a couple of times as people assumed we could understand way more than we could, and got really upset, thinking we were pretending. With all the stuff available on this site, daily intake of podcasts with much repeat for 4-5 weeks should take you a long way.