(Part 2) Top products from r/shanghai

Here's a few tips, although this is without knowing your level and your aims:

1. Naturally, there are plenty of choices of schools. I happen to run LTL Mandarin School, which is located in the French Concession but can also send teachers out to students' locations. A class like this once/twice per week, focusing on specific points of interest, can be a good start for acquiring new knowledge/vocabulary/grammar/etc.
   
2. For further practice of listening comprehension, listening material such as the stuff they have on [FluentU] (http://www.fluentu.com/), the ChineseClass101 Audio Blogs or Youtube channels like this thing I used before are very good.
   
3. For writing and memorization of characters, there's Skritter, as well as Heisig's Remembering Hanzi book
   
4. For vocabulary memorization, simple: Anki
   
5. For reading, I personally like using subtitles of movies I know (helps also with review and learning of new vocabulary). A good resource for this is Zimuzu and Zimuku. Also, you would need a dictionary to use - Unfortunately, it does not work on the Mac, but for Windows users, Wenlin is an excellent dictionary, even though GUI-wise, really bad.
   
6. For speaking... You just need to speak with people. If your level is not up to the task of speaking in a comfortable speed yet, get a Chinese person who agrees to sit with you every week and listen to you botch his language for some sort of payment (otherwise, he will very quickly tire of it and find excuses for why he "doesn't have the time" and so on).
   
   There you go, hope this helps! 加油！

I know that xlb place all too well. It's way better to pop in there late night than order delivery.

And, yeah, I was being a bit hyperbolic. I know that I'm not officially the problem since I don't really count here -- certainly don't vote, anyway. It just got me thinking about things. Will I be one of those guys moving somewhere like Brooklyn in a few years? I paid too much for this place. The noise and all that stuff, it's got to go. I hope not, but I understand how it starts and where it comes from, at least in that context.

I like those spots in that Hengshan alcove, but it's tough to do dinner over there for under say 140 a head. Usually we'll spend more. It doesn't feel right considering the type of people you see walking everywhere. And, of course, the security guard who stands at the entrance to keep out the riffraff. If there was ever a personification of those people not having a right to the city, it's every single one of those security guards.

I'm down in Shenzhen now (still maintaining the Gao'an spot for a few more months), so I know that FFC Shanghai doesn't have it all that bad. Talk about the fortress city... Considering how concerned we were about it in Los Angeles, it's something else to come here and see the future through a scanner darkly. (China's awfully good at that, huh?)

you understand the meaning of this project. thank you for the kind words. this took years to shoot and years of dealing with my local neighborhood shops, lots of whom i'd gotten to know personally, getting shut down and demolished. i wish i'd gone further in terms of documentation, but my intention was not that of a journalist. it was to simply show the scale of urban renewal, the effects it has and the process of it.
if you are interested in the journalistic POV on living in shanghai under these circumstances, this book does a great job.

I would recommend Remembering the Hanzi. It doesn't teach you the word in Chinese but the method helps you absorb and learn to write the most common 1,500 characters in Chinese. This method helped me learn to do some basic reading and is a good complement to Chinese studies. This site seems to have a copy of it. Not sure if this site works but its worth a shot.

For Shanghai history specifically, I always jump to recommend Hanchao Lu's "Beyond the Neon Lights: Everyday Shanghai in the Early Twentieth Century" [1]. It goes beyond the gangsters and movie stars, and depicts what I judge to be the truest to real life situation for the city's masses during the city's first golden age. (The top Amazon review is a sparkling recommendation by Lisa Movius, if that means anything to anybody.)

My second favorite Shanghai recent-history is Nien Cheng's "Life and Death in Shanghai" [2], which recounts her family life through the revolution and founding of the People's Republic, her imprisonment during the Cultural Revolution, and some recent history, but without the bile -- or wide scope, for what it's worth -- of Chang's Wild Swans, which covers the same period of history.

There's another book that covers modern Shanghai (1990s on) by a female journalist but I can't remember the name right now, I'll try to find it when I get home.

[1] http://www.ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9780520243781
[1] http://www.amazon.com/Beyond-Neon-Lights-Everyday-Twentieth/dp/0520243781
[2] http://www.amazon.com/Life-Death-Shanghai-Nien-Cheng/dp/014010870X

History of Cannabis is in stock on Amazon.cn (104.30 with free shipping), but Rise of the Warrior Cop will take a few weeks to arrive (plus it's a bit more expensive).

If you can be bothered to wait for overseas delivery, Book Depository has free shipping.

Are you sure you don't want this one? NEW AUCKLAND!

sweet! ive got one of these bad boys which I can bring along with a laptop. or if mini-keys aren't your thing, I also have a 25 key controller with full-sized keys.

last time i was there they had amps, a pa system and a drum kit so i imagine hooking a laptop up through the sound system/an amp wouldn't be a big deal.