MandarinTube: Learn Chinese From the Comfort of Your Own Home

So I was poking around on the Chinese Embassy's website and saw this link to ShowChina.org. It's actually a pretty interesting website that has all kinds of information about China. On there I came across a link to MandarinTube.com, a site where you can sign up for free and watch all kinds of videos to help you learn Mandarin. At first I thought it was just a bunch of videos of people in everyday situations speaking in Mandarin with English subtitles. Not very helpful. BUT then I looked around some more and it's actually a really good resource. In addition to the video they have a link to another video called "Understanding Video" where they go through the dialogue step by step showing you the written words, the English translation and slowly going through the pronunciation.

We'll see how actually learning this language goes. I took Japanese in college, but this is much harder. Spoken Japanese is pretty easy as the romanji (the way of writing Japanese in western letters) actually looks like what you are saying. Their language is made of fairly simple phonetics such as ka, sa, ro, ni, etc. Mandarin, on the other hand, is a whole different bag. Even though you can write it in western letters it still doesn't sound anything like what it looks like. Then there is the trouble that you can have the same word but depending on your inflection it can mean several different things. I can only hope I don't tell someone their mother looks like a monkey's butt.