Mandarin?

I suspect most of Congress is bought and paid-for by the pharma-lobby. Epipens are also 3x the Canadian price, with similar shortages. And remember the "pharma bro", Martin Shkreli, who bought the manufacturing rights to an AIDS drug and then increased the price 5600%? A few years ago, a woman was denied a heart transplant because she didn't have enough money (the hospital's namesake DeVos is the same GOP megadonor family as the current Secretary of Education.)

The US healthcare system is so broken.

Back on the Mandarin front:

You can find the Foreign Service Institute (FSI)'s Basic Chinese text here, re-transcribed so as to be the most readable: https://git.yojik.eu/eric/FSI-Chinese-docbook/src/master/out/pdf/FSI-Chinese.pdf This is the textbook used to train diplomats, albeit in the 1970s.

The audio is here, along with the original texs: https://www.fsi-language-courses.org/fsi-standard-chinese-a-modular-approach/

FSI courses are 30 hours a week (with 2 hours or so of homework), for between 24 weeks (for French, Spanish, other easier languages) to 88 weeks for Arabic, Chinese, Japanese and Korean.

Although I've never done an Assimil course, the people on my favourite language-learning forum (the DI of languages!) swear by them.

 

Yes indeed I do. In fact I just checked on my old posts, where I mentioned a pharma co. deserving a "Martin Shkreli award" and for another, that it was "Martin Shkreli time again." I believe he's still in jail until around August-September 2023. (He was incarcerated for fraud in a matter unrelated to this price-jacking). When he is sprung, at least 19 agents should be detailed to watch his every move, full-time. And yes - I'm sure there are more Martin Shkreli-type individuals - but he has a name that's hard to forget. And we shouldn't...ever.

A classic wrongo, for sure. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Shkreli

Note: In 2016 (I think) Shkreli was allowed to leave jail (under supervision) as he was invited to speak at Harvard.