One of my goals for this year is to learn spoken Mandarin Chinese. Given that I live and work in China it only makes sense that I learn the language which will ultimately help improve both hopefully. Also given that Mandarin is one of the harder languages to learn (hard as in virtually impossible if you want to read as well as speak it) I am not expecting an easy ride. Last year I read an intriguing article by the author and self proclaimed “life hacker” Tim Ferris titled “How to Learn (But Not Master) Any Language in 1 Hour“. He reasons that before you invest a lot of time on a language you should first deconstruct it into its core components by examining…