From: To: Subject: Materials for Learning Mandarin Date: Monday, June 13, 2005 6:22 AM Dear Professor Xie, I am extremely grateful to you for making available on the web such useful materials for learning Mandarin. I like to flatter myself that I am a fairly competent polyglot, but most of my experience has been with western European languages. This is my first really serious effort to learn a non-western idiom. My wife and I went on a two-week tour of China two years ago, and since several months before the trip I have been having a one-hour one-on-one tutorial whenever I am at home. However, despite the rather high number of Mandarin speakers in the community where I live, and even listening to short wave broadcasts from both Beijing and Taipei and frequently watching DVD movies, I still wasn't getting enough contach with spoken Mandarin. The auditory repetitions your web pages allow have been tremendously useful to me. Many thanks for your efforts. Sincerely, Curtis Blaylock