Today Min and I went over numbers. I had practiced pronunciation twice with a website since our previous meeting. It was still hard, though! To me, counting from 1-10 in Chinese sounded like a song. When Min asked me what individual numbers were, I really had to go through my song and pick each one out. Also, she showed me hand gestures for these numbers, saying they are widely used in China. These gestures are different from American ones--a fist means 10, for example. Doing the gestures helps me remember the numbers, so I hope I can find a website that helps me review that way.
What I did improve on when I practiced without Min, I think, was reading Pinyin. She expects more from me than that, though!
There are some interesting patterns in Chinese. For example, Monday is literally "1 day," Tuesday "2 day," etc. Also, any number with a hundred and a teen has a one in between. Two hundred eleven in Mandarin, then, is literally "two hundred one eleven." Min pointed out that Chinese syntax is very different from English, and we noticed that Mandarin has no copular verb. I expected to find myriad differences between the two languages. Yet so far, I haven't come across any phonemes that are absent from English--in fact, Mandarin even has English retroflex /r/, which is rare cross-linguistically. I wonder if that will help me teach Chinese EFL learners to distinguish between /r/ and /l/ in the future.
Min had some questions for me about English and American culture. She wanted to take a pragmatics class, but unfortunately the pragmatics professor at our school is away this semester. She said she understands graduate students and professors when she has conversations with them, but she can't understand undergraduates. So she asked me to teach her some slang, and I told her she could come with examples of words she doesn't understand in the future. I gave her a copy of our college newspaper, which has slang in columns sometimes.
She also inquired about what parts of the human hand are called in English. When we went over the names of the fingers, she asked why the pinky finger is called that. I laughed--I didn't know! That's just what kids are told in this country! I'm sure there are moments like that when she teaches me, too. She said Chinese children are taught that if they don't say "excuse me" when they ask for directions, the person they ask will give them wrong directions on purpose. Politeness seems very important in Chinese culture.
What I did improve on when I practiced without Min, I think, was reading Pinyin. She expects more from me than that, though!
There are some interesting patterns in Chinese. For example, Monday is literally "1 day," Tuesday "2 day," etc. Also, any number with a hundred and a teen has a one in between. Two hundred eleven in Mandarin, then, is literally "two hundred one eleven." Min pointed out that Chinese syntax is very different from English, and we noticed that Mandarin has no copular verb. I expected to find myriad differences between the two languages. Yet so far, I haven't come across any phonemes that are absent from English--in fact, Mandarin even has English retroflex /r/, which is rare cross-linguistically. I wonder if that will help me teach Chinese EFL learners to distinguish between /r/ and /l/ in the future.
Min had some questions for me about English and American culture. She wanted to take a pragmatics class, but unfortunately the pragmatics professor at our school is away this semester. She said she understands graduate students and professors when she has conversations with them, but she can't understand undergraduates. So she asked me to teach her some slang, and I told her she could come with examples of words she doesn't understand in the future. I gave her a copy of our college newspaper, which has slang in columns sometimes.
She also inquired about what parts of the human hand are called in English. When we went over the names of the fingers, she asked why the pinky finger is called that. I laughed--I didn't know! That's just what kids are told in this country! I'm sure there are moments like that when she teaches me, too. She said Chinese children are taught that if they don't say "excuse me" when they ask for directions, the person they ask will give them wrong directions on purpose. Politeness seems very important in Chinese culture.
Interesting to think about having a counting song for Chinese numbers. Perhaps the ABC song is equally helpful for Chinese students who learn English. That would be an interesting survey study no? Happy studying! Sounds like its going great!
ReplyDelete