I’ve written a new page (not a blog entry) that I’ll update when necessary.
It’s a list of useful sites and applications to help learn Chinese.
In addition I’ve got almost complete spreadsheets with the ‘New words’ from the Hanyu Jiaocheng book 1 part 1 and Chinese Express Talk Chinese textbooks.
See the page at www.lewiz.org/chinese_learning_tools.
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.