This course is a fabulous way to learn a language. Adam is an enthusiastic and knowledgeable teacher who has used his computer programming skills to present an entertaining and reasonably priced course. He has truly leveraged the internet to present a variety of teaching aids, such as being able to choose translations, Chinese characters, or pinyin - with a mouse over effect of getting 2 of the 3 possibilities. So if you choose Chinese characters, placing the mouse over the characters will provide pinyin as a highlighted callout below the Chinese characters.

I stumbled upon this excellently programmed podcast back in Spring and I am ever so glad that I did, because I think it is one of the major reasons for my improved listening ability. One of the things I believe Stanford’s program doesn’t get right is the listening speed. We learnt grammar properly, vocabulary was good and we spoke about as fast as beginners at our level ought to, but we sucked at listening. This is because the teacher always spoke at a slower-than-normal speed which we could easily understand.