David on Formosa

An excellent resource for people learning to speak Mandarin comes from Hess, Taiwan‘s largest chain of English schools. They have published a series of 22 podcasts as a “Chinese Survival Guide“.

The podcasts cover a range of topics. They begin with the basics such as greetings, questions and numbers and move onto more specific topics such as bars, movies and KTV. The format is fairly simply. The word or phrase is said in English and then repeated twice in Mandarin. I suspect Hess probably has a book with the transcription of each lesson that it distributes to its teachers. If you know someone who works for Hess they might be able to lend it to you.

You can download the podcasts from the Hess site linked to above, but it redirects you to Apple’s site and wants you to download iTunes. If you don’t have or don’t want to download iTunes there is an alternative way to download the podcasts. Go to Yahoo’s Podcasts and search for “Chinese Survival Guide”. You can then download the individual files. Each file is about two or three MB with all 22 files taking up 60 MB.

This is an excellent free resource for studying Chinese. Download the files and burn them onto a CD or save them onto your iPod or MP3 player. Then listen and learn at your leisure.

UPDATE: The podcasts seem to no longer be available via Yahoo, but you can listen to them here.