Short of going and living amongst Mandarin-speakers in China – and even then you’ll need some back-up material – we offer a list of bare necessities for starting to learn Mandarin from scratch.

Mandarin Chinese has become a hot educational topic. If China continues with its present economic growth, Mandarin will become an increasingly important international language. But learning it is not for the feeble or faint-hearted. Check out the following:

How hard is it to learn Chinese? [BBC]
Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard by David Moser
How hard is Chinese ? by William Baxter

That said, resources available on the web, and through shops, have made the task very much easier.
It is best to approach Mandarin on a number of fronts simultaneously, and to be prepared for many years of dedicated effort:

(1) Join a class in a Chinese language school;

(2) AND have supplementary lessons with a private tutor;

(3) Watch at least 10-15 minutes of high quality Mandarin language TV [eg Phoenix] [Channel 785 on Sky UK] a day. A completely disheartening exercise to begin with, but persistence pays off.

(4) Buy at least two complementary self-tutor language courses: Pimsleur Mandarin for learning basic conversational phrases, and Rosetta Stone

for learning to listen and pick up the spoken language, and for learning to read Chinese characters.

(5) Buy Bjorksten: Learn to Write Chinese Characters:

and Memchinese software for learning to write. Bjorksten is an excellent tutor on how to be able to write elegant and attractive-looking characters – for everyday communication – with a fountain pen. Memchinese is most useful for a visual demonstration of the traditional stroke order in which characters are constructed. It is worth knowing the traditional method not only because it is common knowledge amongst the Chinese, but also because it helps to put a multi-stroke character together in an aesthetically pleasing way. We are talking here only about ordinary writing as opposed to calligraphy.

(6) Buy NJ Star Chinese wordprocessing software. For someone learning Mandarin, this is software from heaven, and an indispensable resource. NJ Star also do Japanese wordprocessing software. If you want to make serious headway with written Chinese, NJ Star is both a dictionary and means of typing characters on a page. NJ Star also allows you to copy and paste Chinese characters off webpages and then translate them into English, character by character. This saves huge amounts of time looking characters up in dictionaries. Buy through the above link and receive a 10% discount on the retail price.

(7) A basic Chinese dictionary, like What Character Is That?: An Easy-Access Dictionary of 5,000 Chinese Characters by Ping-gam Go:

Software has taken the place of dictionaries in many ways – at least for beginners – but there are always situations in which a dictionary will be necessary, such as deciphering unknown characters in a newspaper or magazine, or even a textbook.

Learning Mandarin Chinese is extremely rewarding, as it offers a glimpse into a radically different culture. Even a few months of lessons will change the way you look at all things Chinese.

If and when we come across better learning material, we will update our recommendations accordingly. We will go into all aspects of learning Mandarin in more detail in future posts. We want this to be an ongoing study, so we welcome your suggestions.