Hi

[thipe]

As a complete newcomer to learning Mandarin I thought it worth a post here. As some background, I'm going to be spending 4 months in Beijing for work from the end of May and so I'm looking to get some basics together before flying out. Unfortunately my timing means I can't really join a formal course prior to my departure

Comments

[frances_bea]

Also, if you have an Android/iOS phone/tablet, you should look into installing Plecodict (pleco.com). At it's base it's a free Chinese-English dictionary app, but it's a lot more than that. They have moved to an a-la-carte feature model where the base program is free (and quite useful), but you can buy additional features including quite a few high-quality licensed English-Chinese and Chinese-English dictionaries for it (also one Chinese-Chinese dictionary) and audio recordings of the 36,000 most common Chinese words being read aloud, so you can hear words sounded out from their dictionary entries. Other add-on features include OCR-recognition of Chinese characters by pointing your phone camera at them, hand-writing recognition of characters, flashcards, stroke-order animations, document reader, etc...

I'm an unabashed fan, and have purchased almost all of the available program features and most of the licensed dictionaries. I like looking up a word and then quickly cycling through the dictionaries to see what each has to say about it.

[thipe]

Ooh great, thanks for the tip - will add it to Hanping :)