Great change is afoot

I do apologize for my long absence. I have been trying to figure out how to get my head around something, what it means to our French learning, our lives in general, and this blog in specific.

I mentioned that my husband was away for three weeks. He was travelling in China. After much discussion since his return, we have decided to move there--possibly very soon.

I have been very preoccupied with researching Mandarin instruction, and generally trying not to be overwhelmed by the thousands of things we have to take care of before we can go. I go from being very excited one minute, to wanting to cry from premature homesickness the next. My husband is laughing at me because I keep thinking of all the very mundane things like how will I find phosphate-free, all natural laundry soap when I'm there? Or, what will I do about finding spelt flour, since that's mostly what I bake with? Oh, yeah, and then there's baking--I understand that few people have ovens in China.

We'll be far from family, so I will definitely be blogging, at the very least, as a way of letting family in on what we're doing from day to day. And I've recently received encouragement from Marie at Le Francais Facile that since Mandarin is radically different from French and English, and because children's ears are so open to languages, there shouldn't be a problem with studying both French and Mandarin at the same time. My initial thoughts are that I will find very different resources for learning Mandarin than I'm using for French. I'm thinking of Rosetta Stone (mostly for myself, although my son, who turned 6 this week, enjoyed the demo) and possibly some private tutoring. In addition, found a really interesting program called Active Chinese and a very intriguing homeschooling option at Little Linguists Academy.

Trying to look that resource up a second time, I stumbled on some interesting resources at Little Linguist.

I'd love to hear the thoughts of others. I promise I will continue the series of posts on resources, in particular, my experiences with Pimsleur and Michel Thomas.