Hi! I am a beginner Chinese learner. I started to learn casually as I have many Chinese friends, and I found out I am really enjoying it! For six months now I have been learning it on my own, but I now that I have some minimal foundation, I believe I would greatly benefit from receiving some professional tutoring. As far as my language skills go: I know approximately 1500 words, not sure about the character counts. I claim I can remember about 95% of them when shown the character, or about 80% of the time when hearing them spoken. I know how to handwrite properly only a dozen of them though. As far as grammar go, I have been training myself by translating children stories from English/Italian into Chinese, and then submitting them to my friends. So I have some basic grasp of grammar, but nothing too sophisticated. As far as spoken chinese is concerned (and this is the area I most want to improve), I am quite the slow speaker, and I have trouble understanding when spoken to (If only people had subtitles!!) My main leaning goal is to get to minimal conversational level Mandarin, so I can start speaking with my Chinese friends all the time and be able to comfortably watch television/movies - as from that point onwards, I expect my learning to become much faster and easier! One minor detail - this is not the first time I learn a language: I am a native Italian speaker, but I came to study in the UK and have been living here since - so I am totally fluent in English, whatever my Italki profile might be telling you :) Hope to hear from you soon, and that you might help me cultivate better this amazing passion that I am developing for learning Mandarin!