I want to learn Chinese but don't have enough time to go to classes. I want to learn it by myself but not sure if it is possible as almost everyone think Chinese is difficult. someone recommend me to go to :

[www.stpinyin.com]

but I am not sure if it is suitable for the beginner.

In my opinion, you'd better ask help for native person, learning a language is not difficult if you can exercise it again and again, if you don't mind i can teach you, surely you need to teach me english in return.

Yeah, I would agree with Ringhuang: Chinese is definitely not a language you should self study. The pronounciation is incredibly difficult and you certainly need someone to correct any pronunciation mistakes. As I'm sure you know, Chinese is tonal so if you pronounce something wrong you run the risk of saying a completely different word.

I actually work as a student advisor for a Mandarin school in Beijing and have studied Chinese before so let me know if you have any other questions about studying.

Rosetta Stone is by far hands down the best program for learning a foreign language.

It teaches you the words, the tones, symbols and ping yin.

As an American is is very difficult for me to understand when listening to the chinese language because of the tones, same word with a slightly different infliction can mean something totally different than what you thought.

if you truly want to learn chinese, go live in China then you have no choice, chinese is the only thing you will hear and must use to interact within the society. Unless you visit an English corner.

to answer ur question: no, its not possible.

Disagree. It's absolutely possible to learn by yourself -- the challenge is that the learning curve is VERY high to start and most learning materials are not very good, so most smart people get discouraged. Or give up at the inanity of the learning materials.

There are plenty of materials online for beginners, and some very good ones here at Chinese Tools. Once you're familiar with the pronunciation, I would also recommend our own site (http://popupchinese.com). Plenty of podcast-based learning materials are available for free on iTunes if you are looking for more.

That said, I'd disagree with the parent poster about Rosetta Stone. The system is horribly expensive and was developed to teach Spanish. Leaving aside the fact it is a bad deal and you're basically paying for a lot of television commercials, the software was designed to teach languages with complex morphology (conjugation, subject-verb agreement, etc.) and grammar structures. This is exactly the opposite of Chinese. You're better off providing your own immersion experience by finding lots of audio at your level and listening to it repeatedly until the language starts to gel -- and it will!

Good luck.

@ Piggerman

The Rosetta Stone is a great beginner program. But offers little beyond the introduction of the language. I found that I had moved past the Rosetta stone very quickly. The best method is to immerse yourself in the environment.