Welcome to Dalian

For the next month, J and I will be in Dalian visiting with her parents.
Also, I hope in the meantime to get a better handle on the Mandarin I've
been studying on-and-off for the last year or so. I started listening to
an audio series by Pimsleur, which has it's benefits, especially for
someone with an ear for music. However, at the end of the day, I need to
have something visual as well, and it's best to study a language from a
number of different aspects. So a while back I decided to invest in a
set of software by the company Fluenz, which is a more interactive
method of self-study, similar to the more well-known Rosetta Stone
series. Fluenz has gotten me a pretty good basis for sentence structure
and some vocabulary, and J has been practicing with me here and there.
Now that we're in Dalian, this is my best chance for immersion in the
language, so I'm planning to not only continue with the Fluenz program
(reviewing it a few times to really get down the vocabulary it covers),
but also attend a school for a couple of weeks.
Of course, that is a practical reason to be in China for now. The other
reason is to celebrate the Chinese New Year with family here, and also
as an intermediate launching stage for our next move, which will be to
Chicago. More on that later, but I wanted to try out a blog post from
here, where I can record this trip and keep people up on what we're doing.