[Rick Lee]

I've only used it for brushing up and working on dialects. If you're already fluent, it's great for looking up old speeches or tv shows in certain dialect regions. My wife watches hours of Chinese variety shows every night on Youtube.

A really cool thing I learned after making Facebook friends with the three teenage daughters of some friends in Austria is that they write everything in the Austrian dialect. So it's like reading the phonetic spelling, since it's not a written language. It's only barely related to German the way they write it. I could understand it for years, but when I read their posts aloud, it sounds like I can speak it too. Pretty cool.