[photopress:learning_mandarin.jpg,full,alignright]This is very personal. I would like to learn Mandarin. And Thai. And a lot of other languages. All my efforts so far at home study have been laughable. Hopeless. Anna Bartram who writes from time to time on these pages says I should hang in there. It is, she avers, perfectly possible.
Now there is a way of taking, as it were, personal lessons by way of the Internet. Our picture shows a computer user in Hong Kong watching online Mandarin teacher Lily Huang at her home on Hainan island. Lily teaches students across the globe via Skype, the Internet telephony system that allows people to communicate for free across the world, often using webcams.
A broadband connection means the 34-year-old from the island’s capital city of Haikou can meet the huge demand for Mandarin teachers in the United States, New Zealand and Malaysia, something that would have been impossible even five years ago.
Whether Lily can help me is a debatable point. There may be a connection between a love of music and an ability to speak a tonal language. That idea has been advanced and I think there may be much in it. I am Welsh and therefore I can neither sing nor play rugby. But I shall certainly give this idea a whirl. Anything to avoid being a mute, inglorious traveler.
Source: China Digital Times