Chinese Summer School blog

Day 3 - 你们好!

Another hot day in Kilmarnock and we're back for another day of learning Chinese. Today we're going to do some more practice on talking about families, but there's also an important task today: tomorrow is our day in Glasgow and we'll be having some Chinese food in the Loon Fung restaurant, so we'll be learning about ordering food too!

Day 2 - More practice

Here's another chance to practise your newly acquired Chinese skills. See if you can answer any of these questions. Remember you can use Chinese characters, pinyin with accents or pinyin with numbers!

1. 你叫什么？ nǐ jiào shénme?
2. 你好吗？ nǐ hǎo ma?
3. 你是哪国人？ nǐ shì nǎ guó rén?
4. 你会说普通话吗？ nǐ huì shuō pǔ tōng huà ma?
5. 你的电话号码是多少? nǐ de diàn huà hào mǎ shì duō shǎo?
6. 你多大？ nǐ duō dà? 你多大？
7. 你住在哪儿? nǐ zhù zai nàr?

That should keep you going! By the way, remember that in question 5 you shouldn't give the actual answer!

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.