John Wilkes Booth

anybody here bi/multi-lingual, or trying to learn a new language?

any thoughts on the best ways to pick up a language, or reflections on the experience of trying to learn a language in general?

i got interested in mandarin chinese cause at work i always find spent cardboard with the symbols on it. at first i just tried learning the symbols... started practicing drawing them and ****, but then got interested in speaking the language as well. so now i've started doing pimsleur. i torrented rosetta stone but found it really wasnt that useful for chinese. so i've been doing the pimsleur tapes and so far i can basically introduce myself and explain that i don't speak the language very well.

i know batlord said something about cantonese vs mandarin which made me look it up and apparently both are different chinese languages. mandarin is the most commonly spoken language, and i think cantonese is the 2nd most common. there are up to like 10 different chinese languages. but one interesting thing about it is that when people speak mandarin vs speaking cantonese, the two languages are different and their speakers cant understand eachother. however, when it comes to the written form, they use the same symbols. so a person who speaks mandarin could write a letter to a person who speaks cantonese, and vice versa. they just can't speak out loud and understand one another, cause they assign different sounds to the various symbols.