I just took up a course in Mandarin. It is a 10 week course. I hope to acquire the language within that period. I feel that by acquiring the language, I may expand my range of language. There were 15 of us in the class just now. All of us have not had any basic Mandarin before.
We spent the whole morning learning the phonetics of Mandarin. We were taught about consonant, vocal and the convention of writing Mandarin characters. Quite interesting too.

There are 8 basic strokes namely dian, heng, shu, pie, na, ti, zhe and gou. When applying the strokes, you should start from top to bottom, from left to right, from outside then to inside.

There are websites that you can learn about Mandarin too such as http://www.hello-han.com, http://www.esulb.edu and http://www.cchar.com.

Well, that's for now.

Xie xie. Zai Xian.