From my personal experience, learning discrete mathematics is not that hard -- as a freshman, I only went to the class 4 times and passed the class -- note I just "passed" it. However it's not that easy -- if you want to get an "A" in your class. I started to realize the importance of it when I was preparing for the entrance exam for applying a master's degree. It is very helpful in every aspect of your life because it contains the excursion of all the practical tools in modern mathematics. It is a cornerstone for your further study in computer science, including the research. You will find that these basic and simple tools from logic, mapping, Combinatorics, graph theory, probability etc. Really stands in the framework of a lot of seemly-complicated papers with notations.
I have started my first teaching assistant duty since 2003, for teaching data structure classes containing a lot of application from discrete mathematics field. In fact, during the past 3 consecutive years I have been the teaching assistant of introduction/advanced level courses of computer science. I found that some of my students only tried to program without thinking it thoroughly, and I believe that was because they did not take the discrete mathematics class before they come to my class.
My tutoring method and goal are simple: just to make you understand the topics fits to your study level by all means. For beginners I will start with questions that motivate your thinking and with very easy questions, however I will not tell you the direct answers but just provide hints, because every person has his/her own way of thinking. Additionally, I would love to discuss with you to understand how you think about these problems and then show you the classical way to solve them.
For Mandarin/Chinese learning, I personally am native speaker. If your goal is to enhance your communication skills, then I suggest you start listening to pop songs and learn the words from it because it may even help you to befriend with native speakers. My suggested material is from lyrics of pop songs, such as No.1 songs from MTV Asia channel, or the best albums of 2012 Golden Music Award Nominee list, which is like the Grammy Award in Asia.
For Networking Learning, my suggestion is that once you have learn all the basic stuff (such as discrete mathematics), then you can start to imagine how to apply them to meet the requirement from the real Internet-based world. The design of good protocols or instrument placement should be simple; the analysis of these methods might be complicated, though. However I can decompose them into small and easy components so that once we learn them together, we could easily move toward the harder part -- you will not feel that it is hard.
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