Entries Tagged 'Mandarin' ↓

I seem to have forgotten to publish this entry.  I must have been interrupted while writing.  Anyway, here it is.

Time is really flying here. I don’t really feel like I’m making progress with my language studies. I guess, initially there’s just such a dramatic feeling of “oh my god I can talk!” or “I can understand!” But anyway, I’m aware there are many plateaus when you’re learning a language. Just need to keep studying and it will come.

Part of my problem is that I’ve started learning the characters, and it just comes much more slowly. Obviously, it all helps to reinforce meaning and sentence structure and grammar and everything, but not strictly helpful. Not as immediately helpful as being able to say “My phone number is…” (“我的电话号码是…”)

I ran into Erez, an Israeli student that was just starting studies when I visited Jeremy last year. Nice to see a familiar face. He is contemplating his next move — maybe staying here in Kunming, maybe leaving. Not surprisingly, he was accompanied by a gaggle of people. He’s a very social guy. His entourage included his brother, two Israeli students, and two Chinese women, one of whom he introduced as his girlfriend. Ha. Well, we exchanged numbers, so I’m sure I haven’t heard the last from him.

Intense few days of classes and studying.  Although, last night I went out to eat with Mr. Cheng and Mari.  That was fun.  I’ve been tutoring Mr. Cheng in English, but for table conversation he’s still a little slow.  So, there was plenty of Chinese as well as English.  We were a little mystified by one of the dishes — “like frog” according to Mr. Cheng, but not toad or eel — but not in our dictionaries and now the Chinese has escaped me.  It was definitely heavy on the vertebrae and was very fatty.  I thought it tasted like fish, but most of it was inedible as far as I was concerned, just bones and fat.  Ah well.  The sour fish was excellent and we had those itty bitty shrimps that are stir fried with hot red peppers.  Yum!

Exploring online today, I found a number of interesting sites:

• Sinosplice – a top-notch site for Chinese language and culture from an academic American perspective.  In fact, I found most of these links on John’s site.  He seems to be pretty tech savvy and has a hand in developing some of these websites.  On Sinosplice, I like his discussion of language and this is fun: a popular Chinese song as a language learning tool
• Adopt a Blog – help circumvent the Chinese censorship of blogs.
• NewsinChinese – a stream of news articles written in Chinese with pinyin pronunciation and English translation available when you mouse over the text.
• Serge Melnyk – this guy offers free Mandarin lessons, both streaming and downloadable.  I think it has too much English, and I’m a little doubtful of some of his interpretations.  But, hey, what do I know?  Anyway, it’s another resource.
• ChinesePod - this is a kind of big budget version of Melnyk’s site.  New podcasts DAILY, which is very cool.  And they broadcast from Shanghai.  I’ve been listening for a while.  Lots of different levels to help you get started and keep building your vocabulary.  Conversational.  Recommended.
• AdsoTrans – a kind of wiki-style Chinese-English translation tool.
• AdsoVocab – same folks as adsotrans.  Promises a little more than it can deliver, but still pretty awesome.  Lets you build vocab lists and create flashcards.  I couldn’t get it to work completely, but I think I’ll keep fooling with it.

Look how well I procrastinate from the actual task at hand: studying Chinese.  So easy to waste hours in front of the computer!

Hope everyone had a happy 4th of July.  Curiously enough, I didn’t see any fireworks here.  Could have been arranged, I’m sure, but somehow I’m not feel very patriotic.