First post

I've set up this blog to log interesting and useful resources I've come across while learning Chinese (standard Mandarin). Mostly for myself, but hopefully can be of interest to others too.

I'm learning for a combination of reasons - I think Chinese is becoming increasingly important on the world stage, and think it's a good idea to be able to communicate at least a little for work purposes (currently I work in quantitative finance, it's interesting to see Chinese markets and investors opening up). But I'm also finding the language and culture fascinating, and plan to visit the country soon.

At this point, I've been learning for around a year and a half. I've found various apps useful, regularly see a tutor, have a language exchange partner, and more recently have been watching subtitled videos on YouTube etc. I'd like to write about each of these different components.

Just a note, I've decided (at least for now) to not learn to write Chinese characters - being able to type using Pinyin is good enough for me, and I feel being able to write, while beautiful, would just take too much time to learn.