You need to have the proper fonts loaded on your computer, and your browser has to know how to find them. If you are running an up-to-date version of Internet Explorer under Windows, and you have installed the Simplified Chinese Language Pack (using Windows Update), LanguageDoctor.com should work correctly. Eventually we plan to make it work correctly under Netscape, Opera, Firefox, Linux, and the Mac as well, but we haven't had time to test all those or write instructions for them yet. (In theory they should already work now, but the difference between practice and theory is greater in practice than in theory.)

The whole font problem can be bypassed by using pictures for all the characters (by selecting "Display w/" and "GIFs" below the left-hand menu), but that will slow down the performance of this whole web site, perhaps painfully so on some dial-up connections. Besides, if you have any interest in reading other websites in Chinese, you're going to want a Chinese font loaded anyway.

In order to represent Chinese text (or any text for that matter) on a computer, each character must be represented by a number. The encoding for English characters has been standardized for a long time (for example, the decimal number "65" always represents an upper-case "A"), but unfortunately a variety of different encodings have been used for Chinese. Two of the most popular encodings have been GB2312 (used in the PRC and Singapore), which assigns numbers to the simplified Chinese characters, and Big5 (used in Hong Kong and Taiwan), which assigns different and incompatible numbers to the traditional Chinese characters. The entire LanguageDoctor.com web site uses a newer standard called Unicode that includes both simplified and traditional Chinese (as well as English and virtually every other language on Earth), and which many people expect to slowly but surely replace all the other encodings. Unicode on the web is itself typically encoded using UTF-8, which is in turn a scheme for representing numbers compactly rather than for assigning them to characters.

As a web user you're not supposed to be concerned about any of this, because a properly written web page identifies which encoding it uses, and any modern browser should automatically adjust itself accordingly. In practice, some browsers may still need some manual assistance in figuring out what to display; for example see http://www.unicode.org/help/display_problems.html.

One has to start somewhere, and Mandarin is a language for which we expect there to be a growing demand as the economy in China continues to expand and American businesses target the enormous potential market there. (The fact that our principal developer's children were all born in China also influenced this choice.)

If the Mandarin work is successful, and if there appears to be demand for other languages, they can be added as resources permit. As you can imagine, adding even a single additional language is a very sizeable project.

We realize that in some cases it might be more convenient for you to have the LanguageDoctor.com software installed on your own PC. However, for both technical and business reasons we have decided that the advantages of providing only a Web-based version outweight the disadvantages:

• New users can begin very quickly without having to download or install any software (except possibly the Chinese fonts, which any student of Mandarin is likely to need anyway).
• Users can access the software uniformly from work, home, or while traveling.
• Our frequent improvements and upgrades are instantly available to all our users.
• A Web-based service allows a more flexible pricing structure.
• We can examine usage statistics to help us improve the service.
• The significant effort that would be required to support local installation, especially on multiple platforms, can be better devoted to improving the service.
• As the availability of wireless capability increases, needing a Web connection should become less and less of a restriction.

LanguageDoctor.com is intended to make your learning more efficient; we never claimed that it would be easy. Our goal is to help you learn as much as possible during each minute that you spend here, with no time wasted on anything you don't need. A private human tutor would make you work just as hard, but this is a lot cheaper.

LanguageDoctor.com is currently free because it's still in early development. The feedback we get from users is far more valuable as this point than any small amount of money that could be charged, so we want to encourage people to use it. Once the service is more mature, we will have to introduce either subscription fees or advertising in order to keep the site running and continue development, but we will probably allow the initial users to continue for free.

"Do one thing, and do it well." We have the skills and experience to provide a very good tool to help you learn to read and write Mandarin. Creating a computer program to teach speech would be much harder, and attempting to do that now would simply divert scarce resources with little chance of significant benefit. Remember that this web site is intended to supplement human teachers and existing courses, not to replace them.

We assume that you are here to learn Mandarin, not to have your time wasted by some webmaster trying to impress you with his whiz-bang web-programming skills. Flashy stuff just isn't required, and keeping things simple makes the web site run faster. All the complex programming (and there is actually quite a bit of it) is put where it can actually help you learn — buried inside the back-end running on the server, figuring out which question to ask you next.

For anyone who feels that a website just isn't complete without cutting-edge buzzwords, please take comfort in knowing that for the development and maintenance of LanguageDoctor.com we use HTML, Perl, CGI, Java, jacobe, cygwin, ksh, CORBA, CVS, JUnit, Apache, Windows XP on a Pentium-4, and SunOS Unix on a sparc UltraAX-MP.

Absolutely. Outside of the exercises applet, our web pages all respect the default settings of your browser. You can make the fonts bigger or smaller, or change their color, by simply changing your browser's settings. For example in Internet Explorer, simply selecting "View / Text Size" from the IE menu will allow you enlarge or reduce the font size.

Inside the applet, you can change your user profile settings to alter the font size and/or color.

We anticpate having users in multiple time zones, so the timestamp in the lower right corner is expressed in Coordinated Universal Time (similar to Greewich Mean Time). For nearly all users this will be offset from your local time.