I bought a couple of phrasebooks while traveling. Making out in Chinese
is a fun one, the Rough Guide Phrasebook: Mandarin Chinese
fits in your pocket.I also used the flashcards by Brainscape. They contain some English > Chinese vocab (+audio), some Chinese > English, some grammar and even character radicals.
I maintain a vocabulary list in a spreadsheet which I export to flashcards using cram.com (used to be flashcardexchange) for long-term memorisation. When I'm in the tube I play the flashcards on the iPhone with Flashcards Deluxe, one of the many flashcards apps that support cram accounts. I haven't tried many flashcard apps actually. I like this one because it allows you to fine tune the spaced repetition algo. So you can set how long it takes before they prompt you with a word you got wrong. And when you get a word right you can set how long it takes before the app prompts you again to check you didn't forget.
Cram allows you to work with 3-sided cards. This is good for languages like Chinese or Japanese where you need to learn characters on top of the romanised version of the word.
For a while I listened to Serge Melnyk's free podcast as well as One Minute Mandarin from Radio Lingua network.
I gave a quick try to Rosetta Stone in a shop. It gave me the impression of being no more than a very polished overpriced phrasebook, I wasn't convinced.
So far the best tool I found is the course by chineseclass101. Courses are structured in a large number of short lessons, each lesson has a 15min podcast with pdf notes, online quizzes, vocabulary and grammar points. It's very progressive and they actually explain you the grammar from the ground up. The vocab always comes with the Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese and pinyin representations. The beginner lessons have 4 lines of dialog each. The advanced lessons have entire texts. You have to use at least the premium option for the material to be useful. The podcasts happen to be lively and not too scripted.
The same company that does chineseclass101 sells an iPhone app WordPower. This one is useful to learn vocab. The vocab is organised in 10 levels of flashcards of about 100 words each starting with the most basic. You can also tackle the flashcards by category.
Letting go of the pinyin
At the beginning I was learning the Roman representation of Chinese words while completly ignoring the actual Chinese characters. Then after using the line-by-line audio from chineseclass101, I realised recognising characters is not that difficult.
Pinyin exists only to give a phonetic representation of the sound for each Chinese character. However anything else than the International Phonetic Alphabet is actually misleading. It's just as lame as those English phonetic approximations you find in Lonely Planet phrasebooks. If you have access to an online resource / electronic dictionary that plays out a word out loud when you click it (such as Google Translate), then you don't need pinyin. All you have to do is read the characters at the same time as you listen to the way they're pronounced in order to associate each character with its sound and tone.
The objective is to learn to visually recognise the Chinese characters, pinyin is just a way to guess the sound associated with the character when the actual sound is not available. If you have access to the real sound, forget pinyin. By the way from my last trip to Asia I got the impression that most Chinese people don't know about pinyin anyway.
For pinyin to be useful you actually have to learn how to pronounce it with a chart like this one, that lists the 4 tones of each syllable combination.
To recognise characters it helps to know the radicals they're composed of. It helps memorisation as well. Sometimes they make sense... Here is a list of radicals together with their simplified version. Brainscape here is a good flashcard tool to learn them. You can find a fun visual way of associating radicals with characters on Chineasy.org.
Texting
I've also found out that a good exercise to train recognising the characters is to text on the iPhone using the Mandarin keyboard. The keyboard expects pinyin as input then suggests a list of matching homophone characters sorted by frequency. Choosing the right character from the list makes your brain work a little bit.
