Have you ever wondered?

Have you ever wondered… This posting is really just a small post about a bunch of those scenario type questions.  Feel free to answer?  I’m not necessarily expecting an answer, but I’m simply asking for the sake of asking.

Have you ever wondered what an animal was thinking as it gazed at you?

Have you ever wondered if that saying “looking as though staring into my soul” is possible?

Have you ever wondered about what’s out there beyond whatever barrier you’ve created for yourself?

Have you ever wondered exactly how all the changes that have taken you by surprise happened?

I think there are endless questions like this with an infinite number of answers… or maybe there are no real answers at all.  I guess at the end of the day if you’re now sitting there wondering, then I’ve accomplished my task.

Day 5: Expansion of Vocabulary

Today Teacher explained to us that she was quite impressed by our pronunciation of Pinyin.  She said that usually Canadians have a very tough time with the pronunciation.  Of course we aren’t anywhere near being perfect, but Teacher says that Chinese would definitely be able to understand us if we were to go traveling.  Naturally as a student, this made me very happy.  I’m eager to learn and have been practicing as much as possible by asking friends questions and even just walking down the street whispering things that I’ve learned between classes.  I wonder if our better than average pronunciation is in part due to the fact that most of us have previous language learning experience.  During the first day of introductions many of my peers stated the languages that they knew.  There was German, French, and Cantonese if I remember correctly.

Today for our practice (we now seem to have practice with our peers each class) I was paired with someone I had never been with before.  Of course, I always sit in the same space in the class, so I’m usually around the same people.  My first partner appears to have dropped the class (she claimed that the textbook was horrible and I feel that she was more focused on learning a bunch of words that she could use rather than to try and understand a complete language), and my next partner was away.  So the person I was with today was Chinese-Canadian who was born in Ontario and learned to speak Cantonese through his parents.  He had never learned to read Pinyin because it wasn’t necessary.  He was a fun partner to have and joked while he explained that he found the Pinyin very hard to read because he already had the Cantonese language experience and could read the Chinese characters.  So whenever he would read from the text he would see the Chinese characters and would then get mixed up between Cantonese and Mandarin.  It was an interesting problem that I had never really pondered before.  This lead Teacher to tell the class a bit about the differences between Cantonese and Mandarin.  For one there is a great difference in the number of tones (Cantonese =9, Mandrain=4 (not including neutrals here)).  Second is that there are similar words between the two languages that differ slightly due to tone or pronunciation. Finally, there is a written difference as Mandarin now uses Simplified Chinese and Cantonese uses Traditional.  Then something quite interesting started to happen. There have been times when I’ve assimilated other English accents while talking with people who have those accents completely by accident.  Well, when reading through the dialogues with my partner, if he would say something incorrectly in Cantonese, I would also mimic it and end up saying something completely different much to his amusement.  The worst part was that I would have to try correcting myself several times before I could finally get back into Mandarin-mode.  How interesting when that happens!

I can’t believe that this little adventure is already half over.  There are only 5 more classes to go!  This now leads me to thinking a little bit about the future.  I heard that the next-level will be offered in the winter, so I could participate in that.  This class has also given me an urge to travel, and so I’m wondering about applying for positions overseas.  Lots of options lead to tough decisions it seems…

Days 3 & 4: Learning more about Pinyin and More Tone practice

Sorry about the lack of updates. In this post I’ll talk about what I’ve learned in the past two weeks.

What happened in the last two classes was essentially that we started to learn a little bit about the different exceptions and special rules that exist in reading Pinyin and reading tones. Just as with many languages, it’s not quite as simple as simply reading what’s put in front of you. There are many rules that you need to remember if you hope to be able to pronounce correctly. I had thought that once you understood how to use the different tones and pronounce the phonetic alphabet, you would be able to read Pinyin. I couldn’t have been more wrong! We were taught about how tones change depending on what other tones they are paired with, as well as how some Pinyin is written in a sort of short form which alters pronunciation.

We’ve also started to build up on more of our vocabulary. We are starting to practice small dialogues. The two that we have done so far were about eating and drinking, quite useful! One thing that I am thankful for is that after reading a dialogue in our textbook, were were assigned to develop our own dialogue. As I am not a person who can remember everything simply by repeating what’s laid out in front of me, I found this to be the most useful part of the lesson because it forced me to think and allowed for a little creativity.

My only concern about the classes now is that whenever I’m told to read something aloud for the class, the teacher does not give me any feedback. I am not sure if this is a good thing or not. I’ve noticed that Teacher tends to say “very good” with students who have bad pronunciation, simply because this class includes many older individuals who are bit less patient about learning a new language. However, with the students who are there for an earnest learning experience, Teacher will correct their pronunciation (which she does with me). I think I should take it as a good sign that she is silent, but I’m not sure.

One more thing that I noticed is about how teacher pronounces the phonetic alphabet. When we have difficulty pronouncing something, she returns to the phonetic alphabet, and if we are still having difficulties she will search for English words to provide better reference. Many of us have started to point out that the English words that she uses do not match up with her own Chinese pronunciation and we have offered her words that sound closer to us. I wonder if this is a common problem when learning the phonetic alphabet for Mandarin.

Day 2: Learning Tones and combining Initials and Finals

Today in Mandarin class we built upon what we had learned before (clearly).  There were a couple of new additions to our class, and I was quite jealous of how quickly they picked things up and were praised by Teacher.  Luckily though, I proved that I too have some skills when it comes to picking up languages, and I received many “hèn hǎo” (very good).

I attribute my ‘good’ pronunciation skills to my method of note-taking.  Some people in class don’t take notes at all.  Instead they simply listen and repeat.  For me I take notes so that I can read over them in the week between classes.  The handouts that Teacher gave us provided English words to give clues on how to pronounce the Intials and Finals, but many in the class were still confused because they didn’t understand that the pronunciation that we are looking for is just a sound in the English word.  Basically for the Initial ‘z’ the word ‘buzz’ was given because we are supposed to compare ‘z’ to buzz.  Although the English words are useful, I decided to listen hard to Teachers pronunciation and then approximate it using English letters.  Really, my notes probably only make sense to me, but they seem to be working because Teacher only had to correct me twice tonight.

So the first part of the lesson today was to begin combining Intials and Finals.  It was a little tough at first, but I think of it as a practice type thing.  It’s not that it’s more ‘difficult’ then pronouncing the Initials and Finals separately, but it takes practice to achieve the vocal dexterity that is necessary to be able to combine two foreign sounds.  My basic method was to pronounce slowly the first time around, making sure that I got the sounds right, then to work on increasing speed and cohesion from there.

The next part of class was to work with tones.  To my surprise, I’m not as tone-deaf as I had thought.  A couple of people in particular mentioned that they couldn’t hear a difference in the tones when Teacher pronounced the different characters, even when she went slowly.  I was quite shocked by this because I felt that they were all quite distinct.  What I need to work on most from this section is to exaggerate the 3rd tone (reversing) more (it was difficult for me to get my voice to go deep enough), and I didn’t get to practice with the rising and falling tones much (it just so happened that I always got called for the reversing tone).

The last and briefest part of our class was practicing some Mandarin sentences.  Since we have started to learn about tones, the natural progression of the text book is to have sentences with several different tones, so I’m hoping to get lots of practice in this week since I didn’t really last week.  On the plus side, my mom tells me that I sound Chinese now, so at least the foreigners believe me!

Day 1: Learning to the phonetic alphabet

So I’ve decided to chronicle my studies here so that I can look back and read about my lessons later on.  First class was great!  There were people in my class from all walks of life.  I guess it would probably be good if I told you about the class in the first place.  It takes place at a local library and is taught by someone with the local university who is a native of China and recently moved here a few years ago.  In China she was an English teacher, and now she’s teaching Mandarin here because she said it helps her to feel relaxed after her days of studying.

She went around asking everybody to introduce themselves and explain why they wanted to learn Mandarin.  There were a bunch of reasons, travel, family, business, curiosity.  One impressive response came from someone who is an ESL teacher and said that they wanted to put themselves in the shoes of their students.  When I mentioned that I’m considering going abroad to teach, my teacher said that she could get me a job in China.  Maybe I’ll take her up on it someday!

So today’s lesson was the phonetic alphabet.  Our teacher is teaching us how to read pinyin, but also several Characters.  We have a textbook that utilizes pinyin and characters.

Today we mainly used the first tone… the flat tone.  We briefly got into the other 3 tones a bit later in the lesson.  Although the teacher gave us English words to help us figure out the sounds, I found it useful to try and create my own equivalents of the sounds.  Unfortunately I missed a few of the Initials and so I’m pretty sure that my pronunciation is completely wrong now.

b – bwu-o

p -pwu-o

m – mwu-o

f – fwu-o

d – du-o

t – tu-o

n – nu-o

l – rlu-o

g – gu-o

k – ku-o

h – hu-o

j – jee

q – chi

x – she

zh – juur

ch – chuur

sh – shuur

r – ruur

z – tz

c – tsz

s – ts

So after practicing with those, we moved onto Finals.

a – ahh

o – ohh, hwo

e – errr

i – eee

u – ou

u – ueu

Then we got into using the tones with ma.  I didn’t find it too hard to pronounce them when over-exaggerating, however some people had great difficulty.  Teacher than gave us this exercise.

mā ma qí mǎ mǎ man mā ma mà mǎ

Apparently this has something to do with mom riding a horse and swearing at him.  Teacher says that if we can say this phrase then we will be good with tones.

And then we got into more Finals, but I won’t list them.

My first impressions.  Very fun, teacher is funny and a good teacher.  Maybe it’s just me, but it sounded like she was singing to us the entire time, so we sung back.  I think it was the only way we could pronounce properly, but I wonder how well that would fly in an actual conversation…

And… already have homework haha..