Week Three

Nimen hao!

This past week has been interesting! On Monday we took a checkup on the new vocab words and Hanzi. We also learned some new vocabulary dealing with names and introducing yourself politely and in a friendly way to others! A few of the various vocab words we learned are: mingzi (name), Qingwen (may I ask), shei (who), shenme (what), wei shenme (for what, why?), shihou (when), gui (noble, honored) xing (family surname), and many others. Next we learned some of the Hanzi for those words, and the order of the strokes for such. Lastly, we learned how to place those vocab words into sentences, both in Hanzi and in pinyin, for example: Qingwen, nin gui xing? Means "May I ask, what is your family surname?" This is very popular in the Chinese culture because it is the formal and polite way to ask your colleague or superior their name, since Chinese culture values their family name highly. Another sentence we leanrned was, " Ni jiao shenme mingzi?" and that means "What is your name?"

Wednesday we took another checkup that dealt with listening aspects and tones of the new Chapter 2 vocab we have learned, and also the rearranging of the Hanzi to make correct statements and questions. Some of the words in the listening section of the pinyin were: gui, shui, xue, wang, laoshi, and shenme. Next, Sun Laoshi showed our class a variety of different Hanzi characters that we had to rearrange into the correct sentence order. These were all dealing with the questions we learned previously on Monday.

Friday, we went over some sentence patterns to begin, like the common questions of "Ni jiao sheme mingzi?, and "Ni jiao shenme zhongwen mingzi?", and lastly, "Qingwen nin gui xing?" For that we had to speak orally with our partners and answer the dialogue back and forth. We also learned how to say "I'm very happy to meet you" which is "Wo hen gaoxing renshi ni(n)".

All in all, I do notice an improvement in my speaking and writing of the characters. Although it will take time to learn these things I would say that it is not as difficult as I once though coming into this course. I definitely still need to work on the stroke orders of the Hanzi, for me, that is the most difficult part of all and will definitely need more practice. Another part that I need work on still is the tones, and working on the correct inflection in my voice to match the tones on the word.

While I do not have any interesting Chinese culture news, I did go to Chinese corner for the first time this Tuesday and had a lot of fun! It was fun to learn the different tongue twisters with the other students and we all had a lot of laughs while doing it! I also think that it helped with my pronuciation of certain words for example "shi" because one tongue twister involves multiple "si" and "shi" recitings in a row. I almost have it down just need a little more practice!!

Zai Jian!

Courtney