Sunday, 11 November 2007
Saturday, 10 November 2007
Learning Mandarin Chinese
For the past few weeks I've been going to Mandarin lessons at Reading University on a Thursday night, right after work.
The first few were pretty slow: basic vowel and consonant sounds, introductions, etc. These things I've muddled my way through during my time in China. Certainly a few knowledge gaps were filled in the first couple of sessions, but there weren't any major revelations.
So far we've covered: introductions, farewells, counting (another thing I'm pretty good at...), basic strokes and characters, family members and some general conversation. Our instructor, Congxia, is forcing us to concentrate on pronunciation and the four tones early on in the hopes that the lessons stick and we all go on to become accurate speakers... as opposed to relying on native speakers ability to work around our shortcomings.
Last week's lessons was really good. I have a whole raft of new words that I need to learn... really useful things like classmates, workmates/colleagues, how to ask for a waitress without calling her a whore, etc.
As I'm at work this weekend I nipped out on my lunch break to get a Subway and an A6 notebook that I will work on tomorrow morning to make a decent English-Mandarin, Mandarin-English dictionary of words I've been taught.
The first few were pretty slow: basic vowel and consonant sounds, introductions, etc. These things I've muddled my way through during my time in China. Certainly a few knowledge gaps were filled in the first couple of sessions, but there weren't any major revelations.
So far we've covered: introductions, farewells, counting (another thing I'm pretty good at...), basic strokes and characters, family members and some general conversation. Our instructor, Congxia, is forcing us to concentrate on pronunciation and the four tones early on in the hopes that the lessons stick and we all go on to become accurate speakers... as opposed to relying on native speakers ability to work around our shortcomings.
Last week's lessons was really good. I have a whole raft of new words that I need to learn... really useful things like classmates, workmates/colleagues, how to ask for a waitress without calling her a whore, etc.
As I'm at work this weekend I nipped out on my lunch break to get a Subway and an A6 notebook that I will work on tomorrow morning to make a decent English-Mandarin, Mandarin-English dictionary of words I've been taught.
Saturday, 3 November 2007
A bit of a 'bum' week
As ever, no updates recently. I just don't really do much that's worth talking about these days.
The past week has been pretty poor, on the whole. On Sunday I managed to slip while walking down the stairs in what I now realise to be very impractical slippers... I was walking down with a finished bowl of cereal, a bottle of milk and the cereal box. My feet came out from underneath me, I shot back, landed on my back and proceeded to slide all the way down the stairs at what seemed like breakneck speed! I reached the bottom at roughly the same time as my now broken cereal bowl and the vast quantity of milk that had escaped from it.
What I find odd is that my back is absolutely fine, but the first few days were very uncomfortable to sit down... presumably my coccyx got a slight beating on each and every step on the way to the bottom. It's much better a week later, but still hurts slightly. I'm hoping this will go away soon.
Otherwise the week has been a time for plans and Wikis... but none of them really played out the way I'd hoped.
Thursday evening I came out from my Mandarin class at Reading university to find some local scally had decided to pop my driver-side window for the fun of it. I guess it's my own fault for leaving my TomTom cradle attached to the windscreen... this time the fact that I'd left the glove compartment open to show nothing was in there helped. Nothing (I know of) was taken, but I had to drive home in the cold.
Yesterday I had Autoglass replace the window through my insurance... a £50 excess and I got a same-day service. I'm very impressed with this, top service. I just wish I hadn't needed to find out!
The past week has been pretty poor, on the whole. On Sunday I managed to slip while walking down the stairs in what I now realise to be very impractical slippers... I was walking down with a finished bowl of cereal, a bottle of milk and the cereal box. My feet came out from underneath me, I shot back, landed on my back and proceeded to slide all the way down the stairs at what seemed like breakneck speed! I reached the bottom at roughly the same time as my now broken cereal bowl and the vast quantity of milk that had escaped from it.
What I find odd is that my back is absolutely fine, but the first few days were very uncomfortable to sit down... presumably my coccyx got a slight beating on each and every step on the way to the bottom. It's much better a week later, but still hurts slightly. I'm hoping this will go away soon.
Otherwise the week has been a time for plans and Wikis... but none of them really played out the way I'd hoped.
Thursday evening I came out from my Mandarin class at Reading university to find some local scally had decided to pop my driver-side window for the fun of it. I guess it's my own fault for leaving my TomTom cradle attached to the windscreen... this time the fact that I'd left the glove compartment open to show nothing was in there helped. Nothing (I know of) was taken, but I had to drive home in the cold.
Yesterday I had Autoglass replace the window through my insurance... a £50 excess and I got a same-day service. I'm very impressed with this, top service. I just wish I hadn't needed to find out!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)