Virtual Mandarin

家庭 jiātíng

In the Summer School which I'm organising, we learned about family yesterday. I thought I'd have a go at describing my own family. As ever, feel free to correct!

我叫马克。
wǒ jiào Mark.

我妻子叫 Karen.
wǒ qīzi jiào Karen.

我们有两个儿子。他们叫 Michael 和 Oscar.
wǒ men yǒu liǎng ge érzi. Tā men jiào Michel hé Oscar.

Michael 四岁。Oscar 一岁。
Michael sì suì. Oscar yī suì.

我有一个弟弟。他叫 David. 他三十二岁。
wǒ yǒu yí ge dì di. Tā jiào David. Tā sān shí èr suì.

我有一个姐姐。她叫 Katy. 她三十八岁。
wǒ yǒu yí ge jiě jie. Tā jiào Katy. Tā sān shí bā suì.

我妈妈叫 Gayle.
wǒ mā ma jiào Gayle.

我爸爸叫 Steve.
wǒ bā ba jiào Steve.

Not quite sure which word to use for "wife" - qīzi 妻子 àirén 爱人 fūrén 夫人 tàitai 太太?

Summer School blog launched

As promised, I've now launched the blog in preparation for the Summer School which we're running in Kilmarnock, Scotland, next week. The blog can be found at http://pienews.blogs.com/chinese/ and we'd be very grateful if visitors to Virtual Mandarin would help to support the learning of 21 young people who are taking their first steps in Mandarin language and culture next week. 谢谢 xiè xie in advance!

我很热 wǒ hěn rè!!!

In Scotland (as in the rest of the UK and much of northern Europe) we're experiencing a heat wave at the moment with unprecendented temperatures. Today at 6pm it was 31° in my home town of Ayr! The temperatures down south have already reached 36.4° today which makes today officially the hottest day on record. So I thought it was only right to learn a new phrase:

我很热 wǒ hěn rè = I'm very hot.

It's good to see that it follows the same pattern as 我很好 wǒ hěn hǎo and 我很忙 wǒ hěn máng and 我很累 wǒ hěn lèi:

我很好 wǒ hěn hǎo - I'm very well
我很忙 wǒ hěn máng - I'm very busy
我很累 wǒ hěn lèi - I'm very tired

你很热吗？nǐ hěn rè ma? - Are you very hot?
你很好吗？nǐ hěn hǎo ma? - Are you very well?
你很忙吗？nǐ hěn máng ma? - Are you very busy?
你很累吗？nǐ hěn lèi ma? - Are you very tired?

Always good to try build the vocabulary in phrases and constructions that I know!

Destination 昆明

Another link in the Chinese language-learning which is happening with young people in Scotland is the visit of a group of students from Grange Academy in Kilmarnock to the city of 昆明, Kunming. They're spending just over two weeks in the city, attending a language school and taking part in a whole range of cultural and tourist activities. I've helped the students set up a blog and they're writing fairly regular entries, although their internet access isn't great. You can follow their adventures here.

They're just one of three schools involved in Scottish-Chinese links this summer and Grantown Grammar School are also keeping a blog of their adventures. The Grantown blog can be found here. And they've got everything worked out technologically so you can even tune into their podcasts on location!

中文暑期班 zhōng wén shǔ qī bān - Chinese Summer School

Way back at the beginning of this project I announced that I was learning Chinese primarily because I was going to be more involved with Chinese in my "day job" in the coming year. The first of several Chinese-linked events begins next Monday when 21 young people from my local area will be coming together during their school summer holidays and spending a week learning basic Mandarin language and Chinese culture.

We're working in conjunction with the Mandarin Gateway, a company in Glasgow who provide access to Chinese language primarily for business people. The wonderful 林凡 has been so helpful in getting everything organised and I'm really looking forward to attending the classes next week with the pupils. We're going to be keeping a blog, all being well, both to provide backup for the students involved in the project, and to make things available to the public. More details of the blog will follow.

我很抱歉! wǒ hěn bào qiàn - My humble apologies

Four weeks since my last post and I have to say 我很抱歉 wǒ hěn bào qiàn because although I've been thinking lots about Chinese and my attempts to learn it, I've just not had the time to follow up my thoughts with some blog posting. Work has been very busy over the past few weeks - I've been travelling a lot. But while I've been travelling I've been trying to catch up with my Chinese vocabulary and, in particular, with my knowledge of Chinese characters. Despite my self-imposed restrictions relating to learning Chinese only through the internet I've actually bought a couple of books and a set of "multimedia flashcards" from Sinolingua. However, I'm a bit disappointed in these flashcards because like many Chinese writing courses they seem to jump straight into fairly complex characters, even providing complex "character in context" sentences. See below for a scan of a sample card. I'll maybe try to follow up with a review of the materials, but for the meantime I'm just trying to get something on the blog!!!

I've still been following Chinesepod.com and I'm hoping that tomorrow I'll get the chance to firm up on lessons 6 and 7 for which I've already prepared my flashcards and just need to find the time to do a bit more work. The Chinesepod website continues to develop and I'm astounded at the amount of development there is on the site. I've let my full subscription slip for the moment - primarily because through June and July I knew that I wouldn't have time to use it and therefore get my money's worth (who says 苏格兰人 sū gè lán rén are stingy?!) but once I get back into my Chinese I'll definitely be resubscribing!

More soon.

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.