All of us are now beginning to learn Mandarin – which is extremely challenging to say the least. The crux of Mandarin is to learn the “tones.” Instead of having as large a vocabulary as languages such as English, Mandarin instead has one-fourth of the words. One word then can mean four (or sometimes five) different things depending on the “tone” you use when pronouncing the word. This can cause problems – particularly in the following cases:
- Buy and sell are the same word
- 4 and die are the same word. Instead of saying 14 the other day, Scott said “Die Person!”
- Mother and horse are the same word – thus instead of saying “I love you mom” it could come out “I love you horse”
The other complicating factor is that the words can take on different meaning when combined. For example:
- “Bao” means bag and “mian” means flour, but “mian bao” does not mean flour bag, but rather, bread
- Ma means horse and hu means tiger, but “ma ma hu hu” means so-so not horse horse tiger tiger.
All in all, we are slowly picking up some key words and phrases, but mostly we just nod along and say “Hao de” (which means OK) a lot even though we have actually no clue what people are saying to us.
2 comments:
Hello,
Hope you don't mind I post here. A nice song by Richie Ren that I would like to present to you on ECpod (can learn some mandarin from this song too): Richie Ren’s Song Animation Video
www.ECpod.com is a free website to learn English and Chinese (Mandarin, Cantonese and etc) using videos. These videos are produced by our members and you are welcome to contribute as well. You can make friends too within our community and find online students to teach.
Sorry if you find the site slow now - it will be resolved in 2 weeks time after we sort out our overseas bandwidth issues. Thanks.
Rgds, Susan
When in Rome, why not let the Romans teach you?
In Huangshan (黄山) southern Anhui province in Eastern China, Fu Shou-Bing logs on to the computer in the public library near his village. Since discovering ECpod.com (http://www.ECpod.com), the retired High School Chemistry teacher has been logging on almost every day to the English-Chinese teaching website. Sometimes he cycles the 25 miles home, cooks himself a simple lunch of rice and stir-fried vegetables with salted fish, often returning once again to the library and his new hobby in the evening.
ECpod.com boasts an educational website that teaches members conversational English or Chinese (no "this is an apple" stuff here) via video clips contributed by other members. After a vetting and often transcribing process by language tutors commissioned by the site, the clips are available free of charge in YouTube fashion. The twist? Members film each other in everyday activities, hoping other members will learn not just their native tongue, but also cultural innuendos lost in textbooks and more conventional means of language learning.
"One member filmed himself cooking in his kitchen. We got a few emails asking what condiments he used," says a bemused Warwick Hau, one of the site's more public faces. One emailer even wanted to know if she could achieve the same Chinese stir-fry using ingredients from her regular CR Vanguard (华润超级) supermarket. "We often forget our every day activities may not be as mundane to people on the other side of the world," Hau adds. Another such clip is "loaches" - a Chinese mother of 3 filmed her children and their friends playing with a bucket of loaches - slippery eel-like fish the children were picking up and gently squeezing between their fingers.
Lately the members have also begun to make cross-border friends and contacts. The ECpal function works much the same way sites like Facebook.com and MySpace.com work - members can invite each other to view their clips and make friends. And it has its fair share of juvenile humor as well. “Farting Competition” features two teenagers and graphic sound effects. Within several days, the clip was one of the most popular videos that week, likely due to mass-forwarding by the participants’ schoolmates.
For other members keen to learn more than the fact juvenile humor is similar everywhere, there are many home videos featuring unlikely little nuggets of wisdom. “The last thing I learned from the site is why you never find green caps for sale in China”, says Adam Schiedler one of the English language contributors to the site. Green caps signify cuckolded husbands, particularly shameful in China as they are a huge loss of face. Adam vows not to buy any green headgear for his newfound friends.
The subject matter of the videos often speaks volumes about its contributors. Members choose their own content and film the clip wherever they please, some of their efforts drawing attention to rural surroundings and the quaint insides of little homes otherwise not seen unless you backpack your way thru the tiny dirt roads and villages along the Chinese countryside.
Idyllic countrysides and cooking lessons aside however, ECpod marries the latest video sharing technology with the old school way of teaching a language - from the native speakers on the street. It's a modern, more convenient alternative to spending 6 months in China. And why not let the Chinese teach you?
Visit http://www.ECpod.com
Post a Comment