@blueblade3000,

Nice to meet you. It makes me happy to hear that anyone wants to learn Mandarin, but most especially with Popup. I've been listening to Popup since '08 and have been a fan pretty much ever since.

As far as a study plan goes, I strongly suggest to take some time out every day to practice your speaking. As long as you're a premium member, then you can have access to transcripts with Pinyin. Read those out loud everyday to practice your pronunciation.

30 minues is enough.

While you're listening in your car, make certain to repeat after Echo (and the rest of the Chinese crew), trying to match your pronuncation with theirs.

The traditional vs. simplified debate is a tough question to answer. I'm much more of a fan of traditional characters and often wish they'd never gone through the simplification process. That being said, simplified characters are still beautiful and much easier to learn how to write.

Characters are not that difficult to learn to read.

The best way is to start off learning the 214 radicals called pian1 pang2 bu4 shou3 偏旁部首. Also learn how to write them as well as their altered forms.

EG: 水 shui3 (water) when used as a side radical appears like the following 氵.

Once you've learned how to recognize and write radicals, then you can form any character in the Chinese lanaguage. Just like our 26 letters can form any word in the English language.

Simplified characters are what's in use in Mainland China, that's just an inescapable fact, so, unless you want to live in Taiwan, you MUST learn Simplified. My advice is to learn Simplified first, then later on you can make the small jump to Traditional if you're interested. The two don't look that much different. Once you learn Simplified, you can easilly handle about 85% of Traditional.

Just being able to read Traditional is OK, but you need to learn to write Simplified.

Initially, try reading simple texts like you have here on Popup. But don't always baby yourself, that will stunt your growth. Constantly venture outside your level and try studying something more challenging. Intermediate and Advanced. You don't have to study it thoroughly, just try listening to it. Go into the study materials and look around. Study some sentences. Do it until your mind feels tired, then back off and go back to lower level material. It's good exercise. It will also help you to get a much better feel for the sound of the language when it's all put together at native speed. Suddently you'll find youself whizzing through lower level material.

The biggest mistake that language learners always make is that they constantly baby themselves. If you follow an 80/20 extensive learning to intensive learning plan then you will make much faster progress.

Extensive learning means, just what I outlined above, read alot. Contact alot of new words and material. Much of it won't stick initially. But don't think that it was a wasted effort, because the next time you come accross that same material, it will be much easier to remember. Our memories need REPETITION. There are too many instant gratification language progams on the internet that make wild promises about learning a language in a month with almost zero effort, which is impossible unless you're a brilliant polyglot. For the rest of us, we need to just be smart about the way we study and dilligent. It just takes more time, that's all. But you WILL get there.

Just remember to throw mnemonic tricks out the window in favor of good old fashioned repetition and thorough study. Repetition is what will help material to stick. Thank God there's Popup Chinese, which uses humour and a clever teaching material structure to help it to stick much more easilly.

If you have any questions or need any more help or would like a study partner, just feel free to ask.

Good luck with your studies.

小虎