Funny article from Forbes on a 4 Day Immersion for Learning Chinese, self taught plus language lessons at Berlitz. Since he is an adult the material he uses I am not carrying.

The subliminal method for learning Chinese is something I have not heard of before. I understand the frustration when he goes to Chinatown and everyone is speaking Cantonese around him. My challenge is people speaking Taiwanese around me :-)

The reason that people speak Cantonese is because overseas Chinese often speak Cantonese (from Vietnam for example). The other is immigrants to the US who came over during the Gold Rush spoke Cantonese. New immigrants from China speak Cantonese, and if from outside of Northern China (Beijing) their local dialect. Post I had about Why Learn Mandarin Chinese, not Cantonese

Items that were not used for studying, that I have heard good things about are (I doubt they would have helped much to be fluent in 4 days):

				Pimsleur Quick and Simple Mandarin Chinese: Mandarin
				Our Price: $19.95
				Pimsleur Quick and Simple Mandarin Chinese: Mandarin (Spoken Word Compact Disc)
				Pimsleur Conversational Mandarin Chinese
				Our Price: $49.95
				Pimsleur Conversational Mandarin Chinese in 8 CDs.
				Chinese For Dummies. Mandarin.
				Our Price: $19.99
				Chinese For Dummies. Mandarin. 3 hours of instruction on 3 CDs.

Labels: Learning Chinese