Chinese Summer School blog

Day 2 - Student recordings

This post is both for the students involved in the course, and indeed for the visitors from all across the world who have been having a look at our blog in the past couple of days. This is basically what two students sound like having been learning Mandarin for two days!

Download Day2_RolePlay.mp3

Well done to Lesley and Nicholas!

Day 2 - Podcast

Access today's listening below:

High quality mp3 (for broadband - 11.8mb)
Low quality mp3 (for dialup - 2.4mb)

Sorry these files are a bit big today - they're quite long because of all the numbers we did today.

Day 2 - Photos

For today's photo gallery, click here. In addition to learning lots more Chinese today we played Chinese whispers out in the sun, and sampled Chinese tea.

What did you think of today's lesson? I found it quite hard because of the heat and the fact that there seems to be so much more to remember. I don't know about anyone else, but I find lots of the words similar to each other which makes things difficult for me. How did you all feel about it?

Day 2 - Days and months

To access the audio files for numbers, days and months, use the following links:
Download Days and Months.mp3

Day 2 - Topic 7

Our final topic today was talking about our families. We learned about the Chinese family and about younger brothers and older sisters and how having more than one brother can make things a bit complicated in terms of language!

Day 2 - Topic 6

One of the most important things you need to do when you're introducing yourself is say where you live.

Day 2 - Topic 5

We also learned to talk about ages today: asking how old people are, and talking about birthdays.

Day 2 - Topic 4

We've just learned how to ask people for their phone numbers. Click "Continue reading" to read more.

Day 2 - Topic 3

Before we go any further we've been learning how to start off a class and finish a class in Chinese. You can listen to the audio file featuring the class trying this out by clicking here. Click on Continue Reading to see the vocabulary.

Day 2 - Topic 2

今天是星期二 jīn tiān shì xīng qī èr. Today is indeed Tuesday and our second topic today is talking about days. Of course days are very easy in Mandarin because you only need one word - 星期 xīng qī - which is followed by the numbers. There's one exception to this - Sunday. We've also been doing the months too. Click on "Continue Reading" for the vocabulary list.