Mandarin Courses

[tigerstobutter]

Hi

So I'm looking at good intense Mandarin courses that are at night or on weekends. Right now, I'm looking at U of T or Ryerson continuing ed, but I'm not sure if they're good.

Has anyone taken these courses and if they liked it or not?

Or if they knew of any alternatives that better?

[tomotomo]

http://chinesepod.com/

[exit12000]

http://www.themandarinschool.com/splash.asp

Great school...

[ACC-Major]

Hi

So I'm looking at good intense Mandarin courses that are at night or on weekends. Right now, I'm looking at U of T or Ryerson continuing ed, but I'm not sure if they're good.

Has anyone taken these courses and if they liked it or not?

Or if they knew of any alternatives that better?

take those courses at a Local College like seneca or GBC

[Eazy E]

So I'm looking at good intense Mandarin courses that are at night or on weekends. Right now, I'm looking at U of T or Ryerson continuing ed, but I'm not sure if they're good.

Did the U of T Con Ed course in earlier part of decade and it wasn't intense at all. I'm looking at doing an intense course too, ideally in May/June.

I've looked at The Mandarin School and this one:

http://www.firstclassmandarin.com/

[fly]

I've taken the evening course at Seneca @ Finch. I took the intro course and supposedly if you want to take the more advance courses you have to sit down for an interview where they test you to make sure you'd survive the course. It was pretty good -- only thing scary is the parking lot at night as it gets pretty dark. They teach you both pin yin and writing skills. You come out with a certificate.

[Hairball]

I've taken the evening course at Seneca @ Finch. I took the intro course and supposedly if you want to take the more advance courses you have to sit down for an interview where they test you to make sure you'd survive the course. It was pretty good -- only thing scary is the parking lot at night as it gets pretty dark. They teach you both pin yin and writing skills. You come out with a certificate.

I took the intro course at Seneca a few years ago, I thought it was a pretty good intro, and now I can read any pinyin sign. My actual conversational ability is still very poor, as I haven't used it much subsequently.

Sometimes I find it really confusing because there are numerous words that are different from my native Cantonese. It's almost like another language.

[vipse]

as a native mandarin speaker, i'm glad to see all of you willing to learn chinese

[Homer88]

as a native mandarin speaker, i'm glad to see all of you willing to learn chinese

Yeah... lots of Cantonese speakers are trying to learn Mandarin now because in the very near future, knowing Cantonese alone will not get us any jobs in Asia.

(That and to meet those Taiwanese chicks)

[march9]

dont want to hijack the thread but does anyone now a good place to learn Japanese? should I take it at my school (UofT) or at some independent schools?

[alanbrenton]

How much do these courses cost and are these based on Simplified (seems so) or Traditional Chinese characters? I'm sending my daughter to Taiwan during the summer.
EDIT --ouch! $800 for the beginner's course.

There's also Livemocha if you wanted to chat with Mandarin speaking people all over the world. I think it's based on each party helping the other one learn/build on a language skill.

For someone like me who have some rudiments of the language, what would be the best way to build proficiency? I already watch those Taiwan tv series every night with my family and can usually comprehend 80-90% of the subject matter (with chinese subtitiles) as they are light/fluffy. When it comes to reading magazines though, I'm at a total loss.

I am planning to look for good websites on interesting topics and use the Yahoo Chinese-English dictionary to look up meanings of some words that I'm not familiar with. I'd appreciate if any one can give me links to decent sites where I can brush up on my Mandarin.

http://tw.dictionary.yahoo.com/searc...B4%AF%E8%A8%88

I know I will have to learn Pinyin and simplified Chinese too as I am currently more familiar with bopomofo and traditional Chinese characters.

Yeah... lots of Cantonese speakers are trying to learn Mandarin now because in the very near future, knowing Cantonese alone will not get us any jobs in Asia.

(That and to meet those Taiwanese chicks)

As an aside, I thought HK women were hotter than Taiwanese women? I guess you may be right based on the rules of probability as there are 20 million or so people in Taiwan vs. 7 million in HK.