Answers
Aug 10, 2012 - 06:05 PM
Ah, well, just discovered that this is not in fact free. There's a free 14 day trial, but then it's $68 per year. Not sure that I'll have time to use it enough in 14 days to really know if it's worth it, which is a pity. It seems promising, but the other free ones might be just as good for all I know yet.
Aug 12, 2012 - 07:33 AM
Have discovered another resource that seems pretty useful, and this one does seem to be free (though it has a paid extension that I don't know the value of). It's called Pleco, and I have it as an Android app. Not sure what other forms it might be available in. It's a dictionary, essentially, but it shows the characters, and the pinyin. It also has audio available in both male and female voices, and that audio is slow and deliberate to allow you to pick up the pronunciation pretty reliably. I used it today to ask the concierge in my hotel for a kettle (turned out it was in the cupboard already), to get a bag from a shop assistant, and to ask another shop person if they had milk (cow's milk actually, since that's not necessarily clear over here!)
Aug 26, 2013 - 12:15 PM
Adding this here, so as to allow for different searches :)
Found this yesterday. Looks like a pretty good teaching style. Small word of warning. The author seems to be Taiwanese (I think that's what I read), and she seems to use some dialect words that aren't "standard mandarin", or at least aren't standard according to my resources. Also, she seems to be working in traditional rather than simplified characters. However, it's pretty effective, so I hope it helps. She has a TEDx talk too that you can find by searching for chineasy tedx. Here's her main page: http://chineasy.org/
Found this yesterday. Looks like a pretty good teaching style. Small word of warning. The author seems to be Taiwanese (I think that's what I read), and she seems to use some dialect words that aren't "standard mandarin", or at least aren't standard according to my resources. Also, she seems to be working in traditional rather than simplified characters. However, it's pretty effective, so I hope it helps. She has a TEDx talk too that you can find by searching for chineasy tedx. Here's her main page: http://chineasy.org/