According to The Economist, Chinese may be a fad for misguided fools. The tonal intricacies and delicate inflections of the Tang tongue are too much for those more accustomed to the Romance languages.

Adam Schokora gets up close and personal with ChinesePod host Jenny Zhu in an interview on his new blog, 56minus1.

Stig in Shanghai created a nifty Chinese character game for learning some of those hard-to-remember characters.

It's levelled so you start out easy and build up after a while. It even supports some cell phones, so you can kill time as you travel in train or bus.

A report has found that the standard of Chinese teaching in Australian high schools is ineffectual, with 94 per cent of final year students being 'first language' speakers.