A Journey of a Thousand Miles Begins With The First Step

I work in the electronics hardware industry in California. The workforce is very diverse which sometimes leads me to wonder what my Chinese, Vietnamese, Korean, etc... co-workers are saying. So I decide to pick one of these languages and start learning it. Chinese seemed like a good choice considering how powerful China is becoming economically and considering the number of speakers.

A few questions revealed that Mandarin Chinese is the official version of the language but like other languages I'm familiar with (e.g. German) it has many variants and dialects. So I bought a book on learning spoken Chinese ("Mandarin Chinese The Easy Way" by Williams and Wu) and began studying it.

This blog will record my attempts to learn and speak Mandarin Chinese in the U.S. I'm not learning the language to travel to China. I just want to figure out what all these Chinese in the U.S. are saying.