Dictionary, anyone?

We've been using the Better Chinese program, mostly online for learning Mandarin. Today, my parents visited for the first time after their return from a trip to Florida. I'd had a bunch of things shipped to them while they were there, so the Better Chinese print materials, CDs and games arrived at our house today. I'm so impressed.
I also received a DVD I'd ordered called "Play and Learn Chinese with Mei Mei" which was a huge hit, especially with my daughter.
While I was preparing supper tonight, I heard something really amusing. Both the older kids were watching the video, but my daughter was talking--I'm not sure to whom; sometimes she carries on little conversations with imaginary partners--and she said, "Le monstre à manger le gâteau." Throughout dinner, she carried on in French, and was quite intent on educating grandma and grandpa about the meanings of words in French, but also came up with a variety of things to define in Chinese.
I have just one frustration. I am often called upon by my children to serve as a walking French dictionary, which is fine, because I often know the things they're asking, and if I don't, we've always got our trusty French dictionary.
Now, they're starting to do the same with Mandarin, and I almost never know the answers, which is also fine, but how does one look them up? I'm really not good enough with Pinyin (the romanization of Chinese) to guess at the pronunciation of words. I suppose that will come, in time. We have already started our classes in Mandarin, but I'm finding I'm learning just as much or more from the things I'm doing with the kids.
Actually, it's interesting, because at our first lesson, I was much less overwhelmed than my husband, who hadn't had the same opportunity to interact with the kids' materials.
Back to the dictionary, I guess we'll have to make ourselves some Mandarin-speaking friends really soon after we move so we can find our own walking dictionaries!

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.