This group will no longer meet. 对不起。

Hello, there.

I know that studying Mandarin should involve direct dialogue so one could grow accustomed to hearing, reading and speaking the language, so I decided to get this little group together. We’ll meet every Saturday and read articles/dialogues/other material from the website http://readchinese.nflc.org.
Here’s the first lesson I want to hit, in case you want to study a little before the first meeting:

问与答

李小姐：王先生，你是老师吗？

王先生：不，我不是老师，我是学生。 李小姐，你呢？

李小姐: 我也是学生。 你是中国人吗？

王先生：是，我是中国人。你是美国人吗？

李小姐: 我是美国人。

We’ll first use an online dictionary like http://www.nciku.com (which is so awesome; if you don’t know a character’s pronunciation, you can kind of draw it to look it up, and it’ll find it) to break apart every word and learn the stroke order. I would want to keep away from using pinyin more than necessary, however.
I mean. It’s great to learn a word at first, but it could become a kind of handicap, so I really would like to avoid using it as much as possible; try your hardest to learn the characters’ pronunciations the first time around. If at any point you can’t remember any character’s pronunciation/meaning, feel free to look it up again, but don’t turn it into a habit, and try to learn each character as soon as possible. Of course, if someone doesn’t know how to read a character’s pinyin, we’ll all pitch in to help, but I don’t want to turn this into a pinyin-reading study group.
We’ll then assign roles and have each person read either 王先生’s parts or 李小姐’s.
Each of the articles/dialogues have activities at the end, so we’ll implement them as a kind of quiz at the beginning of the next group meeting to review material. I’ll be taking the same quizzes alongside everyone, and I won’t look at the answers beforehand, so this will really be a study group as opposed to me teaching you Mandarin, you know?

Again, this is a study group, and this implies that you are studying Mandarin outside of this group and are only implementing this group as a way to keep information fresh and as a way to practice your Mandarin reading/speaking/listening skills with others. I’ll only be here to get this group moving, but otherwise, I’m just another Mandarin student, not a teacher. :D

I hope to see you there! :]

(Note: I may place up the lesson that we’ll be covering in the next meeting on this page so everyone could have a chance to study beforehand if they want. Chances are that I’ll just have us hit each lesson in order, but if we ever go out of order, I’ll let you all know beforehand.)