A few months ago I decided to learn to speak Chinese. My wife is from mainland China, and we would like to live there someday. After looking a lot of possible programs, we chose Pimsleur’s Mandarin Chinese. I use the cassette course , but there’s also a CD version.

Here’s why a like Pimsleur so much:

1. The lessons are all aural – there is no workbook. This may seem like a drawback, but in fact it’s a definite plus because you are forced to learn the language naturally, the same way you learned to speak as a child.
2. The pacing is perfect. Each lesson is about 25 minutes long, and you can stop and start within a lesson easily. I usually listen to a lesson three full times (over the course of 5-6 car rides) before going on to the next one.
3. It reinforces word memory well. The Pimsleur method does an outstanding job of introducing new words while reinforcing old ones. The result is you that words get "burned in" to your long term memory in such a way that you don’t forget them. I didn’t realize how powerful this technique was until I was on tape 8 and they touched on a phrase we hadn’t covered since tape 2. Amazingly, the words came easily without any "ums" and "ahs" as I struggled to remember.

Bottom line: Pimsleur’s Mandarin Chinese is a great value. It can be a little expensive. Once you’ve completed a course, it’s unlikely you’ll need it again, so you’ll find a lot of them for sale on eBay. Click here for a list of those currently on sale.

Re: Jeremy’s E-Mail Stress Disorder or Burnout? :

Like most people I know, Jeremy’s feeling a little overwhlemed by all the email he gets. While I certainly get this feeling from time to time, it happens a lot less frequently since I adopted the Getting Things Done method. The main rule I try to follow is, never read an email twice, at least not while it’s in the inbox. When I get an email and click on the header, I try to read it and…

• Reply, and/or
• Delete it, and/or
• File it as a reference document outside the inbox, and/or
• Assign a task to act on it later

These concepts apply to my real world inbox, too. I have one of those plastic inboxes that all my physical stuff goes into – mail, notes from any meetings I just returned from, voice mail messages etc. Once a day or so I try to go through my physical inbox and apply the same rules as above.

Sometimes I fall off the wagon, but I’ve gotten pretty good at this. I rarely have more than 5-10 messages in my inbox.

This is just one little tidbit from It’s a very powerful system that has quite literally changed my life. Get it, read it, live it.

I’m with Dave on this. Google’s lack of support for RSS is just plain Evil.

And if enough people link to Google with the phrase “Google is Evil,” maybe they’ll hear us.

Even better, link to them like this:

evil

(That’s “evil” as a link to Google inside <h1> tags.)

This is pretty cool. Mail to the Future is a tool that allows you to schedule an email from yourself to yourself to be sent to you up to 30 years from now.