Back to Learning Chinese...again

Yeah, it's time for a new strategy for learning Chinese while working a more than full-time job (at least 50 hours a week on a good week), chores around the house, travelling, yada, yada, yada.

Looking back over the last 11 years or so, I have tried to become literate in written and spoken Chinese many times.  Here are the strategies I remember:

1. Learn how to listen and respond.  [Failed: too many homophones]
2. Memorize characters and their pronunciations (using my own romanization) [Failed: couldn't remember all of the minute differences between characters]
3. Learned how to write each character, learned its pronunciation using BoPoMoFo phonetic symbols, and learned the definition. [Limited Success:  I learned the characters and could recognize them on TV, the newspaper, etc.  However, I didn't know how to place the characters in context to actually communicate with anyone.]
4. In addition to #3 above, I also started learning the words that are made up of two or more characters combined.  [Better, but I still can't communicate in sentences]
5. Finally, I added sentence construction (grammar) to #4 above.  Result: better, but it's time-consuming.

Yeah, I'm whining.  If I really want to learn the language (and I really do), then I have to make time.

Being a developer, I'm tried using my skills to make flash card programs, etc. to help me learn Chinese.  I never really got far enough along with them before I said, "This is too time-consuming" and gave up.

Well... I'm about to try it once again... This time, I want to create an iPhone app. 

I looked around the App Store and saw a ton of language apps, but most were all about memorizing individual characters and none of them had any grammar lessons.  Also, some of the audio was definitely from someone from mainland China.  I've been speaking very broken Chinese for the last 11 years, and I can't change my accent (to add all the "R" sounds).

(continued in next blog entry)