Virtual Mandarin

Tones - makes so much more sense now!

I had a meeting today with colleagues from the Mandarin Gateway, an organisation based in Glasgow heavily involved in promoting Chinese language and culture throughout Scotland. Through the PiE project, my "day job" we're going to be involved in a number of Chinese initiatives in the coming year, starting with a Chinese language and culture summer school for students in local schools.

Anyway, after our meeting I had the chance to speak to 林凡 who helped solve something which has confused me since I first started learning Chinese.

你好 nǐ hǎo to me should have been pronounced both in 3rd tone, but any time I hear people saying 你好 it sounds as if the 你 is either a high tone or a rising tone. Today, 凡 explained that when two 3rd tone words come together, the first one is pronounced in 2nd tone, so it becomes almost ní hǎo, although it would still be written in Pinyin as nǐ hǎo.

I guess this also works for 很好 hěn hǎo because that's another phrase which sounds much more like hén hǎo!

I also found out today about 因为 / 所以 sentences:

因为我今天很忙所以我今天很累
yīn wéi wǒ jīn tiān hěn máng, sǔo yǐ wǒ jīn tiān hěn lèi
"Because I am very busy today, therefore I am very tired."

So 因为 yīn wéi is "because" and 所以 sǔo yǐ is "therefore". Once I've learned a few more adjectives I'll try to come up with some more examples.

我今天很好 Wǒ jīn tiān hēn hāo

我今天很好 wǒ jīn tiān hěn hǎo ... but 我今天很累 wǒ jīn tiān hěn lèi! Back from holiday and although I got a chance to look at some Chinese I didn't quite manage to catch up with everything up to lesson 10 of ChinesePod! However, over the next few days I've got a few long drives and I started today with a 5 hour return journey to Inveraray (hence 我今天很累) during which I listened to episodes 4,5 and 6 back to back on repeat! A bit confusing - lots to cover, but I'm hopefully back on track a bit (hence 我今天很好！).

So, starting with episode 4, here are my notes and thoughts. Again, please feel free to comment if I'm getting anything wrong! Your comments and emails are very much appreciated.

Lesson 4 begins with introducing 今天 jīn tiān which appears to mean "today". Fairly straightforward. The position of 今天 in a sentence seems to be quite flexible, but in the conversation given it appears after the pronoun 你 nǐ: 你今天好吗？ nǐ jīn tiān hǎo ma? Presumably then to say "I'm very well today" I can say 我今天很好 wǒ jīn tiān hěn hǎo. And using the other vocabulary already covered, there are three statements I can make:

我今天很好 wǒ jīn tiān hěn hǎo "I'm very well today"
我今天很累 wǒ jīn tiān hěn lèi "I'm very tired today"
我今天很忙 wǒ jīn tiān hěn máng "I'm very busy today"

I think I'm also right in saying that in none of the above examples I should be using 是 shì because the 很 hěn has a verbal quality, as Matt explained.

The answer to the question 你今天好吗? nǐ jīn tiān hǎo ma? in the conversation is 很好谢谢。你呢？ hěn hǎo, xiè xie. Nǐ ne? "Very well, thanks. And you?" All makes sense so far, and it's these phrases I'm feeling very confident with now because I've heard them so often. Moving on, there's some new vocabulary introduced in the next section:

I like this one! 马马虎虎 mǎ mǎ hū hū apparently means literally "horse horse tiger tiger". No idea quite why that means "so-so", but there's no doubt a good explanation! Why is the speaker just 马马虎虎？Because 他今天很累 tā jīn tiān hěn lèi, "he is very tired today". Obviously in the first person he/she says 我今天很累, but I just thought I'd report the speech by using third person 他今天很累。

A couple of totally new phrases coming up, but I think that these will probably be coming in very useful.

真的吗 zhēn de ma means "really?", as if the speaker is confirming whatever the other speaker has said. I'm not sure about the literal translation of 真的吗, but it seems to be followed naturally by 为什么 wèi shén me, which means "why?"

The natural answer to a 为什么 question will begin with "because..." which is 因为 yīn wéi, in this conversation 因为我很忙 yīn wéi wǒ hěn máng, "because I'm very tired." I guess the speaker could also have said 因为我今天很忙 yīn wéi wǒ jīn tiān hěn máng, "because today I'm very tired". Obviously that would be overkill on the 今天 but I guess it works grammatically and I'm just trying to get used to using it!

OK, so that seems to be all the new language covered in the lesson. I'm going to try to construct a conversation based on everything I know so far. I'll be using some of the constructions I used in my previous conversation from lesson 3.

A: 你今天好吗？
B: 我今天很好，谢谢。你呢？
A: 我今天很累。
B: 真的吗？为什么？
A: 我今天很忙。
B: 你今天去哪里？
A: 我今天去学校。
B: 我也去学校。

A: Nǐ jīn tiān hǎo ma?
B: Wǒ jīn tiān hěn hǎo, xiè xie. Nǐ ne?
A: Wǒ jīn tiān hěn lèi.
B: Zhēn de ma? Wèi shén me?
A: Wǒ jīn tiān hěn máng.
B: Nǐ jīn tiān qù nǎ li?
A: Wǒ jīn tiān qù xué xiào.
B: Wǒ yě qù xué xiào.

A: How are you today?
B: I'm very well today, thanks. And you?
A: I'm tired today.
B: Really? Why?
A: I'm very busy today.
B: Where are you going today?
A: I'm going to the school today.
B: I'm also going to the school.

A few things I'm not 100% sure about there. First of all, I'm not sure about the position of the 今天 in the sentence 我今天去学校. I don't know if 今天 always comes after the pronoun, but it does seem to do so in sentences like 你今天好吗？ Maybe someone reading this could help here.

I'm also not sure about the 为 with its two pronunciations:
为什么 wèi shén me
因为 yīng wéi
Is this definitely correct? Does 为 have two pronunciations with different tones?

Anyway, that's enough for tonight. Need to work a bit more on the new 汉字 covered in this lesson and will add them to my flashcard collection in the next few days.

iPod image versions - Chinesepod 01-09

If anyone is interested, here are the links to the Chinesepod conversation transcription flashcards I've done for my iPod to keep my brain in gear while i'm on holiday! I'll hopefully come back in a week a bit more confident with the contents of lessons 1-9!

Lesson 01 zip
Lesson 02 zip
Lesson 03 zip
Lesson 04 zip
Lesson 05 zip
Lesson 06 zip
Lesson 07 zip
Lesson 08 zip
Lesson 09 zip

Instructions
Just download the zip file, unzip it and then copy the images into iPhoto or whatever app you use to manage images on your iPod. Then once you have transferred the images onto your iPod, play the lesson you want to listen to and while it's playing go into Photos > Slideshow Settings > Music > select "Now Playing". Make sure Time per slide is set to "Manual" and Shuffle Photos is set to "Off". Then navigate back to your album list, select your album, eg. Chinesepod-01, select the first image and then click the play button. You should now be able to toggle between the different slides as you listen to the text.

Hope this is useful to some of the other newbies out there - and if you do download the files, let me know what you think by posting a comment.

Long time no post!

It's been a while since I've posted anything on my Chinese blog, mainly because I've been really busy at work and haven't had much of a chance. However, as of tomorrow I'm off for a week's holiday and since I'm all packed (believe it or not!) I've just spent an hour doing iPod image versions of the conversations in Chinesepod lessons 1-9. I'll take these with me and when I get a minute while we're on holiday I'll try to make some progress with my Chinese!

Thanks, by the way, to everyone from the Chinesepod community who has commented on my flashcards. There will be more, especially of the character ones, just as soon as I can get round to it.