Hello everyone!

I've decided to begin a journey into learning Chinese. I am interested in not just Mandarin, but also quite a few of the other varieties of Chinese. In particular I feel I have the resources and abilities to get pretty far into Taiwanese Hokkien (here after simply Taiwanese, in line with current English terminology standards) and Cantonese, so the primary focus in this blog will be my language learning adventures with Mandarin, Cantonese and Taiwanese. This summer I thought I'd get a general sense of tones and tonal languages. I don't want to get caught up in characters or other difficult things due to other things on my plate. So, long story short, I've decided to focus on Taiwanese (in POJ) for the time being.

I'll be working through a combination of lessons from Taiwanese Pronunciation updated by Martin Symonds (found here) and grammar lessons from Spoken Hokkien by Meili Fang (found here). (Yes, I could just use Symonds' Taiwanese Made Easier coursebooks (and I'm sure at some point of my Taiwanese study I will make my way into them), but I wanted something just as sound and with an answer key. I primarily am learning without a teacher (hence the wish to promote corrections and comments on my blog).

Anyway, I intend to start working through both resources, and randomly posting progress updates, notes, things of interest, and questions as I go along. Updates will probably be random, but I hope to post at least once every 2 weeks. Perhaps more if time, energy and material allows. Unfortunately, Chinese (in any form) is not my focus at the moment, thus the 2 week time frame.

Until next time!