With regards to the revitalization of the board, an idea which occurred to me was that we could collectively attempt to learn a language, which would be decided through community consensus. It would spark discussion and camaraderie as skilled students helped weaker students in their attempts to master the grammar, and Skype or videochat sessions with one another for practice purposes would be a matter of great entertainment and fun, I would think. Of course, we would also be acquiring a new (and very useful) skill.

I propose that we collectively learn Mandarin Chinese.

We could always type characters, and regardless typing out the pinyin romanization along with the tone annotation would suffice quite well. Along with the the plugins which blackhole is now currently mentioning in IRC, I believe the board would serve as an effective medium for collaborative learning.

To start, I would personally recommend the purchase of some quality textbooks. After reading a fair number of reviews, I have purchased used copies of the following on Amazon:

Character Text for Beginning Chinese, 2nd Edition by John DeFrancis
Beginning Chinese Reader, Part I by John DeFrancis
Learn to Write Chinese Characters Johan Bjorksten

Of course, each person's learning style may differ. A resource I have found to be invaluable in my search for information about language acquisition is the How-to-Learn-Any-Language.com forum (http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/forum/default.asp), which is populated by a fairly impressive number of polyglots and is frequented by one Dr. Alexander Arguelles, a notable polyglot and scholar of languages. There is a wealth of information available on that forum about efficient ways to learn vocabulary or to start learning a language, etc.

One approach with Arguelles allegedly uses is the passive approach with a technique he calls "shadowing." I believe the relevant posts are very easily found. He is quoted many times here under the alias of "Ardaschir."

Of the three books which I listed above, regardless of the method which one is using, I believe it would be essential to purchase the third. From what little I formally know, the writing of Chinese characters is a complex art and not at all a simple matter that can be haphazardly learned.

As an encouraging note, I believe it has been said that only a vocabulary of about four hundred characters is required to understand the majority of Chinese news publications. It will take effort on our part to reach that benchmark, but it will hardly take us years before we are capable of reading Chinese newspapers somewhat proficiently. I would think that an industrious student would be able to reach that goal rather rapidly, in fact.