How I learned to understand 1000 words of Mandarin in 1 month

The secret has been to work primarily with dialogues, as I think the brain responds best to conversations (given that they're the basis for all communication) starting out at about 1 minute, and getting progressively longer. I describe starting from scratch here

http://davidamartin2sblog.blogspot.com/2009/12/learning-mandarin-from-scratch-2.html


This INTENSIVE and REPETITIVE listening (and re-reading if I had forgotten something) in combination with the EXTENSIVE and REGULAR listening to larger dialogues (I love the LingQ Chinese Podcast, there's so many cool topics) while reading along in English helped me to accustomize myself to the language very quickly.

I also experimented with transliterating the larger dialogues into pinyin and printing them out so that I could read along and create my own vocab lists in the margins/above the words to improve my extensive reading and listening without having to learn the characters, which I think helped me a lot to understand longer passages and expose myself to a lot of new vocabulary in a short period of time.

You can access 31 of the 40 lessons of Zhang Peng Peng's Intensive Spoken Chinese here

http://www.chinese-tools.com/learn/chinese