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First, all Chinese learn pinyin to start with - english characters - so they can learn their own language. Eventually, they phase in Chinese characters. Pinyin is not pronounced the same as English (for no coherent reason I can figure out).

Second, all Chinese type in pinyin on computers because their language is impossible to enter in any other way (remember that stupid keyboard Michelle Yeoh used in that James Bond movie?)

Third, Mandarin is WAY more complicated to learn than English. Aside from the tones (Chinese is a homophone language, meaning each tone has 1-9 pronunciations, depending on dialect, with Mandarin using about 4 and Cantonese using 9)... and the tones let you differentiate words like 'horse' and 'mother'. My wife insists that most Chinese make their way through foreign accents by figuring out the context of what they're saying.

Fourth, the Chinese word for their language is zhong wen which means a combination of Chinese language and culture - the language is mostly comprised of idioms of 3-4 words which are nonsensical unless you've grown up with the culture and stories. This is mostly because Chinese don't like to say anything that hasn't been said before, mostly because saying something different and shocking is culturally problematic. English idioms are used far less frequently and are usually easier to grasp.

Fifth, unless anyone has something better to suggest, I've never had good Chinese instruction I could process, from Rosetta Stone to Pimsleur, my wife's patient instructions, to using speech recognition software I configured myself, which would let me hear and understand the different tones.

Not to be all culturally superior or anything, but can we either make English the global lingua franca, or just get working overtime on improving live simultaneous translation technology (like jahjah?

For me this is another reason to use Jajah Web: it does not infringe this patent.

De jajah vu http://www.jajah.com/ , http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/10/29/193822 6?

If Skype was open source would they have had the leverage to enable free calls within North America until the end of this year?

You can also do something pretty similar without a wi-fi connection, and without a microsoft OS phone; you would just need a phone with with a browser and a WAP connection...

There is a service at http://www.jajah.com/ which allows you (via the internet) to arrange VOIP calls between two landlines or mobile lines. It's not free but pretty cheap; rates are just about equivalent to skypeout rates.

Not to sound like an advertisement; but it seems like there are still other services that may still come out before everyone needs to:
1. Admit defeat to the MS juggernaut
2. Rush out and get a brand-new MS phone or PDA

Obviously, for those of you that already have such equipment, great... But I'll hold out with my phone that I got "only" 6 months ago.

(Yeah, I'm aware that there are people in S. Korea, Japan, and Hong Kong that may have already gone through 6 handsets in that period of time).

Well... fortunately, there is. Leaving aside gizmo there is a newborn app called jajah which supports an impressive number of protocols, among them IAX2 which was designed from scratch to work seamlessly behind NATs.

And it offers five minutes of free calls (yes, that is free calls to any phone, anywhere in the world) to any new registered user, and you don't even have to leave your card number! (hey jajah admins... BEWARE OF THE BOTS :) )

Although it's only available for Windows right now, I think it has a lot of potential to become a truly Skype killer

Anyway, it's always good to know that Skype has this kind of competition (jajah, gizmo, etc). That can only be good for all of us, voip users!