Brian Zhang Larsen | 
04 6th, 2006| 
My Chinese teacher, recently send me a link to a nice site with “learn Chinese” podcast. It is called www.chinesepod.com and everyday they make a new cast, in one of their 4 leaning levels, newbie, elementary, intermediate and advanced. There is also possibility to download the transcript with hanzi, pinyin and English translation. It features an Irish guy and a Chinese girl, chit chatting and performing and explaining Chinese dialogues.
It turns out that this phenomenon actually is available for various languages. If you are interested in Japanese you could try www.japanesepod101.com, or if you are struggling with English, you could try www.englishpod.com (same people behind chinesepod).
It has become kind of big to learn Chinese in the western world at the moment. A recent article in wired describes how elementary schools and middle schools all over the world now are increasing their Chinese offerings. And recent news here in Denmark confirmed that, for Danish primary schools. With that market growth it sure is interesting for the western world to do business there. Not only to move production facilities there, but the increasing amount of richer and richer buyers makes it a lucrative export market for high quality consumer goods.
But in order to really make the language a world language, I think someday the Chinese have to abandon or come up with an alternative for the characters (hanzi). The Korean people successfully abandoned it in 1945, and the Japanese now has two alternatives. The Katakana and the Hiragana alphabet. I think, the prospect of learning a couple of thousands new characters will keep many people away. Not me though, I am struggling with my first 100 at the moment.