I went out and had my first real Chinese lesson yersterday. Somewhere along the line I got confused about where the lesson would be and ended up back at the bookstore from earlier. I tried to find the book that Saffron has, but it was to no avail. I swear I saw it in there jsut the other day too. After a quick call to Nancy, we located each other and the lesson began.
Pinyin. Whoever invented pinyin should be beaten on the head with a large stick. Even though it uses basically the same alphabet as the English a large persentage of the letters don't make the same sound as any of the other languages that use it. How does a "c" make a "ts" noise? I'm sure it will get easier once I use it more. But for now I find it strange and... weird.
Tones. The tones are going to take some getting used to. I have to really concentrate to get the tones right when I speak them, and they are very hard to hear.
There are a lot of things I could probably complain about the Chinese language, but as a native English speaker, anything I caomplain abouit with the language probably has an equivilkent and then some for English.
Grammar. I've only made a couple simple sentances, but so far the grammar seems to be very easy. I don't think I'll have much trouble mixing around words once I get some vocabulary down.
The characters. I love the asthetic appeal of the Chinese characters. I know it will be hard, but they'rte much less daunting now that I see them on a regular basis. I can already recognize some of the ones I see on the bus signs.
The class was a lot of fun, and I think I learned a good bit. I don't really remember much of it at the moment, but I'll be practicing for the next class, and I'll do better then.
2 comments:
Yeah pinyin isn't really related to our alphabet... in many ways. One suggestion, if u want to learn Chinese, is to ask your tutor to spend maybe 2 weeks (depends on how often u r havin lessons) just on pronunciation/tones exercises, because that is what it all comes down to in the end. The Chinese won't understand what u r trying to say unless u pronunce it correclty...
When I first started learning Chinese we spend the most of our first 2 weeks (4 hours/day) doing 'aaaaa' booooaaaa' pooooa' exercises. It takes a while to get used to!
I agree with Jonna. Surprised you attacked all fronts in the first lesson! Here we spend at least the first 12-15 hours just on listening to pinyin and tones without opening your mouth. It sounds a little insane LISTENING CONCENTRATION CAMP but works well! The key is to use different activities to immerse the student in the sounds bombs until he gets a feeling before actually opening his mouth...
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