Sorry, what I meant was not being a native speaker of English :)

Hey, I spent some time in Nanjing last year trying to find a good job. Because I speak Mandarin fluently, I thought it wouldn't be a problem. I didn't want to teach because I still wanted to improve my Mandarin by speaking with colleagues. But the only jobs that were easy to find as a foreigner (even non native) were the English teaching jobs. And most of them are better paid than IT positions in Chinese companies! That's why Chinese people will assume that as a foreigner, you don't even want some other kind of job. That and the fact that English teaching is a big big industry there and they need every foreigner they can get. I finally only spent the time there improving my Chinese. If I ever wanted to find a job there again my new plan would be to find a multinational corporation to work in and then get myself sent to China to work there. That way, the salary is way better and you can still work in IT. Cheers, Murmel

True! That's why they should start thinking about making SERIALS based on games and NOT MOVIES. It works well in China, Chinese Paladin (xian jian qi xia zhuan) was an awesome serial and very well received by the audience, they then also made a serial for the 3rd part of the game (they skipped the second one though as the story was rather lame, so now there's just xian jian 1 and 3).

You can't just squeeze all the story depth and character development of the games with a good story in a 2 hour movie.

Well, even if they block it, there's still proxies to get access for the people who know how to use them, as well as the very big community of chinese speakers in foreign countries who don't lose google in their native language.

I think this whole move is more about preserving the service for the chinese "language community", not the chinese country (even if the country makes up most of the language community).

I actually started learning the Hanzi using "Learning Chinese Characters" (http://www.amazon.com/Tuttle-Learning-Chinese-Characters-Revolutionary/dp/080483816X/) and bought Heisig's book to compare them, but even if they are based on the same principles, the first one is way better.

Matthews & Matthews book not only teaches you the meaning, but also includes mnemonics for the pronounciation and the tone of each character. Maybe it's not that important for Japanese, but Chinese characters give you a lot of clues about their pronounciation using phonetical components, so learning their pronounciation at the same time actually saves you a lot of time. Why memorize "man + lord" = "to live somewhere" if you actually know that "lord" and "live" are both pronounced "zhu" and thus can easily memorize that "live" is something that has to do with "men" and is pronounced like "lord"?

Also, the book comes with drawings to help you remember the basic building blocks AND has awesome crosslinks between the entries everywhere and a very good index that enable you to find what you are looking for so much faster. Of course, it only teaches you the first 800 ones (+ their components) while Heisig already takes on 1500 in his first and 1500 in his second book, but I hope there will be another Matthews & Matthews book for HSK B soon.

I started studying Chinese in September too and I'm trying a lot of techniques to memorize it quickly and efficiently.

As others have already mentioned, Anki (http://ichi2.net/anki/) is the way to go for memorizing vocabulary, as it uses a psychological algorithm that helps you repeating things as often as you need to. If you then install the pinyin toolkit plugin for learning chinese it's the best thing to learn chinese vocabulary as it imports all your translations, pinyin and even sounds automatically when you just enter the Hanzi.

This pinyin toolkit also uses a nice colour system for the tones. Basically, every character is displayed in a color depending on its tone: red = first tone orange = second tone green = third tone blue = fourth tone black = no tone

You can go even further and WRITE the characters in those colors when practicing. The tones of each character will stay in your memory WAY better!

Another tip when trying to memorize chinese characters: try to grasp the meaning of their components and learning to read and write them will be way more easy. You can use sites like nciku.com or archchinese.com where characters are split up in their components. However, you won't find everything there. There's also an extremely good book called "Learning Chinese Characters" (http://www.amazon.com/Tuttle-Learning-Chinese-Characters-Revolutionary/dp/080483816X/) - it teaches you the 800 most common chinese characters by telling you everything about their components and even giving you stories to remember the components of each character. It's by far the best book I've found for learning how to write chinese.