I learnt a few words years ago. I still remember them!

I’d like to learn it properly (spoken first then written if possible) and to speak Mandarin to my son/help him learn too.

Any tips- anything that’ll help bookwise/discs etc etc courses?

There’s a course starting at the beginning of July on edX, it’s free so not a bad place to start!

https://www.edx.org/course/chinese-language-learn-basic-mandarin-mandarinx-mx101x

Hora, in addition to the edx course, also worth looking to see if there’s local Chinese Sunday school type thing in your area. They normally have kids and adults classes. Good luck!

xie xie!

Marry a native speaker, it helped my Cantonese.

I imagine there are evening courses being run at your local college or community center, usually these are run by a native speaking student, that’s how I started my Japanese.

Marry a native speaker, it helped my Cantonese

I’m marrying a BBC- all I know in Cantonese are the repungent/bad swear words. 😀

That’s all they speak.

I took an evening class for Mandarin recently, as with Cantonese its a tonal language (4 if I remember rightly) and because I am tone deaf I found it was easier to learn sequences of words.
You may find this the same, try not to memorize each word by rote, try to learn sequences like the classic such as ‘hello, what is your name’ etc.
RTHKs Naked Mandarin podcast is also a good start.Naked Mandarin

The Confucius Institute have a number of centres in major universities now, which all offer language courses. The one I did in Liverpool was cheap and provided textbook & CD for each level (Happy Chinese Kuaile Hanyu). The key first step was to learn the tones and pronounciation if you are going to learn via Pingying, so the CDs were really good for that. I also found it useful to learn in a group and to have it in my diary so I had to do some ‘homework’ each week. Since I left I have forgotten most of what I learned. I think we were lucky with our teacher, but she gave us a lot of information and discussion about the culture too, the differences between cities, the drinking culture, food, politeness (or not) etc. It was fun.

Are you going to try and learn Cantonese too? 😉

Don’t use a CD. I spent 6 months listening to this crap on the way to work every day. Keen to impress tried it out on my mates missus, – blank face. You’d get the face shapes and intonation way better with someone in the room.

It’s very tough and almost impossible to learn to write from what I am told (I can recognise entry and exit signs but that’s about it). The Chinese will always speak better English than you’ll manage Mandarin.

My vocabulary is yes, no, hello, happy new year.

http://www.memrise.com/