Learning Mandarin

I have fallen in love with the Mandarin (chinese) language.
It is EASY too. Seriously. It's not so tough as people think. After just one 2 hour lesson (my first class) I can already pick out words from mandarin comments on message boards and from songs.

Of course, that is with pinyin. With pinyin, the Latin conversion of chinese characters, it is really quite simple. It's like when Turkish scholars translated (and simplified) Turkish from the Arabic script to a Latin script. It makes a languages SOOOOO easy to learn.

Mandarin has no tenses! Past, present, future. It's all the same. You just have to add a noun like "tomorrow" to differentiate.
Example: wo shi = I am
wo shi _____ = I was, or I will be. depending whether you add tomorrow, or yesterday. although I think it would be ______ wo shi in this case. noun before the verb in this sense.

To make a question a question it's the same as Turkish. You just add "ma" at the end.

To negate a sentence simply add a "bu". Either before or after the noun depending on the context.

Not too hard folks. There are probably close to 30 pinyin characters and then there are a few accents to add on. The direction of the accent indicates to the reader the tone of the letter.

example: in French, you could say, Je vais a Paris. That "a" would have an "accent grave" on it. Like a downward slope. In pinyin that character would be said: "ahh" with a downward tone. Like in the word: "Fall". easy eh?

some chinese music:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZQvy4yXjH4c

and a great chinese-english dictionary with pinyin:

http://www.mandarintools.com/worddict.html