Note: the tutorial referenced here is no longer available.
China is somewhere I’d love to visit, but verbal communication in anything other than English (or a very bad mixture of French and Spanish) is about all I’m capable of. I’m planning to devote some time over the next several years to learning Mandarin (and possibly Cantonese) A student from Western Kentucky University offers a crash course in pronunciation of Mandarin Chinese words and phrases with the help of a few MP3 files. While the selection of words and phrases is somewhat limited, the pronunciations and explanations of reading Pinyin seem quite helpful. Digging around, there’s also a link to another site which covers some of the Cantonese dialect. Greetings are covered, some shopping basics, simple food words, key travel phrases like ‘I am lost’ and a variety of inquisitive sentences are all covered to provide a source for hearing correct pronunciations of common words and phrases. You won’t master Mandarin with this site alone, but it might help break you in to the idea of learning a new language.
