I'm pretty new to learning Chinese, but I deal with a lot of Chinese clients at my job, so I think knowing this language would be good for my career.

Can anyone tell me how long it might take to learn well?

Also, I'm currently looking for good resources to use for learning Chinese characters as well as pinyin.

I've heard some pretty good reviews for ChinesePod, as well as for an eBook called chinEASE that seems to teach you how to learn Chinese characters (http://www.chinease-ebook.com), and also about the Pleco and nciku dictionaries.

Any thoughts on these, or other resources that might be of help to me?

Thanks,
Tom

Welcome to the club! the resources you found in your research are pretty useful and I guess most of the Chineselearners are using them:

Chinesepod? yes! I would personally recommend it. You have to pay but in my opinion it is the best you can get.

Pleco? I am using it every day since I am studying Chinese at university. I have no heavy dictionaries to carry :)
The best tool there is the optical character recognizer. you have to pay for it but its worth every penny: you just hold your iphone over the text and the recognizer tells you the pinyin and the translation of the character.

The learning speed depends on yourself. If you can afford two hours a day you might get pretty far in a year, possibly get to hsk-3 level.

good luck!

Hi Tom, and welcome.

Consitency is key, it's better to do a little every day than a lot one day then nothing for a few days. Skritter encourages this, as your reviews mount if you don't deal with them!

I do around 1/2 hour a day, as it's all the time I've got, and I'm making progress, but slowly. learninglife is doing more and I know is doing well.

Good luck and welcome to a fascinating, and sometimes frustrating, journey!

Thanks a lot for all the encouragement and recommendations on how to study! I look forward to contributing more to this group!

another cool tool for learning a language or anything else is QUIZLET. it lets you create vocabulary cards on their website and then you can study them on the computer or on your iphone (quizlet alo has an app now).

you can find tons of free online Chinese character learning resources. Some of them are very good, such as MDBG.net, archchinese and yellowbridge. I use Anki for flashcards.

Tom, the amount of time it will take to learn well has been indicated as four times as long as a European language. So maybe eight years? That said, I think chinese and Vietnamese are about the same, and my experience with Vietnamese is that if you try and speak the language with native speakers who don't speak English, you can achieve some basic fluency in a few months.

Dave M.