Learning grammar on the go -- good audio or small books or ?

[character]

What are the good grammar resources which can fit in a back pocket or on a Pocket PC?

Most of the audio grammar I've heard so far isn't very detailed; I'd like to find some which are like a reading of a grammar book. Failing that, a small grammar book or web pages I could put on a Pocket PC would be good.

I did find a book, Mandarin Chinese Coursebook by Living Language, but it's a bit large to put in a back pocket. Most small Chinese-language books are dictionary/phrase books, which isn't what I need.

[flameproof]

Why not just put the grammar you want to know in DOC or PDF? Then you can look it up if requested.

If you have a grammar source book you can also just scan it to PDF and then read with your PDF viewer.

Grammar on Audio will be difficult. Most learning material has grammar in the book, but not explained in the lessons. A workaround would be again to make your own audio files, just reading from the books you have.

[roddy]

here's a few you might want to look at - I'm not sure how good the pdf reading options are on PPC, or how it will handle the Chinese text.

Incidentally, what were the audio options you found?

[character]

Roddy - thanks; I think the weak link with DRM'ed ebooks for me is that I have Windows Mobile 5 on my phone and ActiveSync is pretty DOA except every third blue moon. It looks like the readers are for PPC 2002 and most require ActiveSync. I can take out the memory card and copy to it fine, though.

The audio I have tried include ChinesePod, FSI Chinese, Pimsleur, and Instant Immersion Mandarin Chinese. All fine sources, but at this point I can't learn grammar by a few examples; I need a good discussion of the mechanics.

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Flameproof - thanks for your suggestions. Unfortunately, if I had the time to do what you suggest I could just sit down with a book. Right now I am able to eek out about an hour of listening during a day in the shower/bathroom and to/from work. So audio is preferred. If time becomes available I may get a book scanner and do what you suggest.

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I have downloaded most of the Rutgers course and some of the MIT Chinese courses; if they turn out to be what I need and work well on the phone I will post about it.

Ultimately (after winning the lottery) I'd like to get a UMPC like the Sony UX390 and put Wenlin, all the audio sources, web pages, and ebooks of various kinds on it. Perhaps with some text to speech program it could read most of the text, but I suspect there's no TTS program which handles Chinese, pinyin, and English all mixed together.

[character]

An update -

I checked out the MIT OpenCourses on Chinese

http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Global/all-courses.htm#ForeignLanguagesandLiteratures

Some of the PDFs looked useful. The phone comes with ClearVue(sp?) PDF reader but that wasn't ideal.

I was able to get the Adobe Reader for PPC 200x installed by installing and using Mobile Device Center (ActiveSync for Vista, essentially). The automated install on the phone fails, but manually launching the install on the phone afterwards works. The Adobe software "reflows" the text to better fit the small screen and has a fullscreen mode which one can scroll by dragging a finger on the screen up or down.

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So a start at a mobile grammar solution. If anyone has other ideas (esp. audio sources) I'd love to hear them.