"Beijing Sounds" blog

Beijing Sounds is an entertaining and useful blog on Chinese language and culture, written by a foreigner learning Chinese in Beijing. This post is a great discussion of the question "Is Chinese hard to learn?"

The blog features a great deal of interesting commentary, in English with Chinese and pinyin, on the particularities of the Beijing dialect (such as the ubiquitous "er") -- and many audio clips as well. If you too are hoping to one day speak Chinese in Beijing, this is definitely worth checking out.

Via Languagehat, another great blog on all things linguistic.