Golden Week

The May golden week has just passed by. Did you have a good holiday? Or were you hiding in your own home to avoid the crowd?

In China, there are three most important holidays: May Holiday (May 1 to May 7), National Holiday (October 1 to October 7), and Spring Festival (Date varies, but normally be late Jan or early Feb, and lasting for 7 days.

The public holiday is actually only 3 days for each of the three holidays, but people switched and put the previous weekend and the next weekend together to make it up to 7 continuous holidays, and fixed the date to be May 1 to May 7, Oct 1 to Oct 7. For the Spring Festival, since it is the 1st day to the 7th day of the first month according to Chinese calendar, so there is no fixed date.

Normally the May holidays and National Holidays are also called by most of the media the “golden week”. So when did this golden week start? And how did it start?

Every year, during May holidays or National Holidays, millions of people are getting on trains, buses and planes, as they use the opportunity of seven days off work, beginning Tuesday, to escape the daily grind which is exactly what the government expected. The first golden week started in 1999. It happened at a time when China was reeling from the Asian financial crisis and desperately needed more growth.

If you are a holiday maker to china, it's best to avoid coming in from May 1st to 7th or from October 1st to 7th, even if you are coming for business, I suggest you avoid these “golden weeks”. They are logistical nightmares for planes, trains, even taxies. Everywhere you go, there will be “ren2 shan1 ren2 hai3” (people mountain people sea, which is a Chinese four character idiom to describe big crowd of people). Maybe the government is considering a solution for the situation. We will wait and see.

Canton Fair

If you are new to Guangzhou and suddenly you find the traffic in Guangzhou became much worse, there is traffic everywhere no matter it is rush hour or not. Or your friend is coming to Guangzhou, but the hotel prices are so high much higher than what you expected. Or you go to the restaurant that you have been for so many times, their prices increased a lot for no reason. Or you go to the foot massage, they give you the same price, but the time is much shorter than before. Don’t be surprised. All of these are become of the CANTON FAIR which is commonly known as广交会(guang3jiao1hui4).

The Canton Fair was established in the autumn of 1956. The first Fair was staged in the former Sino-Soviet Friendship Building in the spring of 1957. The Fair serves as a historical witness to the development of China's foreign trade; it has faithfully recorded the pace of the country's growth.

This Canton Fair is the 101th one. It started on 15th April and will continue to 30th April. The most important feather of this canton fair is that the official name is changed from中国出口商品交易会(zhong1guo2 chu1kou3 shang1pin3 jiao1yi4hui4) which means “Chinese Export Commodities Fair”to 中国进出口商品交易会(zhong1guo2 jin4chu1kou3 shang1pin3 jiao1yi4 hui4) which means “China Import and Export Fair”.

Well, some people may love the canton fair. Some may hate it. If you haven’t experienced canton fair, then now you may want to go there to have a look. As a foreigner, you don’t have to pay money to get in. So take the advantage and go to experience it.

Students in action

Mandarin Corner brought a battle against the sexes as we split the boys and girls up to play some games in Chinese. In the photos below our students are playing a game where they choose an envelope full of words and must make a correct sentence from them and then say what it means.

People are competitive by nature and it was no difference here as the boys were in minus points and the girls were up in the lead...... but it was not long before the guys fought back and won the game - still with disputes over our points system!!

Chinese Stone Lions

I have been asked by two students why there are often two stone lions in front of the gates of some buildings which really caught me out of guard. I have been seeing stone lions so often that I never questioned why people put them in front of their doors.

So I went on the internet to look for the answer, as Ben said, everything is “googlable”. The following is what I found:

There was no lions in China originally. The earliest stone lions were sculpted at the beginning of the Eastern Han Dynasty (25 - 220 AD) with the introduction of Buddhism into ancient China. In the Buddhist faith, the lion is considered a divine animal of nobleness and dignity, which can protect the Truth and keep off evils.

Lions are symbols of strength, power and dignity. In china, its imagines especially represented power and prestige. A pair of stone lions, a male and a female, can often be seen in front of the gates of traditional buildings. The male lion is on the left with his right paw resting on a ball, and the female on the right with her left paw fondling a cub. The ball played by the male lion symbolized the unity of the empire, and the cub with the female thriving offspring.

The most common material used to carve the lions is stone. But metal lions are also very commonly seen in front of the buildings. ( The photos shown here are taken by me last winter in the Forbidden City of Beijing. Can you tell me which one is male? Which one is female?)

Maybe you have other questions about the stone lions, write to me and I will try my best to answer your questions.

Chinese language partner for as little as 8 RMB!!

8 RMB for a Chinese language partner?!?! Is this possible you ask! I am sure the picture has given it away and you have guessed I am talking about the friendly taxi drivers that many of us spend time with everyday (and no comments that they are not all nice!!). Simply chat with your cabbie and practice your Chinese - easy!!

Most of the drivers in Guangzhou speak Mandarin as their first language, admittedly they may have a Funan (hmmmm, Hunan) accent or they may be local drivers with a Cantonese accent, but either way it is a great opportunity to speak Chinese. People always tell me they do not want to make a fool out of themselves with their friends and colleagues as their language skills are not good. This is even more of a reason to use the taxi driver as your language partner because the chances of seeing them again are limited so who cares if you make a few mistakes!!

Introduce yourself, ask him some questions, say anything you like. It will help you to remember what you have learned, can build your confidence and you can even learn some new words and phrases as your skills develop. At the end of your journey you can even grab the fapiao and claim the 'language training' on your expenses!

Trip to the flower market

As Ben mentioned in his blog on February 12, 9 adults and 6 children including Koco and I set off on February 15 to the Xihulu flower market - the oldest spring festival flower market in Guangzhou. We took a lot of pictures. Students bought “wu3dai4tong2tang2guo3” (five generation in a family) which is a very traditional spring festival plant in Guangzhou and some other flowers. Their picture also made the way onto the front page of the Guangzhou Daily newspaper. Here are some other pictures:

Mandarin Corner - 11th March

Next month we will hold our third Mandarin Corner on Sunday 11th March. It will be a chance for our students, their friends and anyone else to come along and practice their Mandarin. Our trainers will organise fun games in Chinese so feel free to pop in and take a look.

Three Little Pigs - Chinese style

Following on from Tina's earlier post about Pigs I thought I would share this interesting flash cartoon movie. Its the story of the Three Little Pigs; the catch.... its all in Chinese! It includes the script in Chinese characters, pinyin and English. Its hilarious... Enjoy!

http://www.chineseblast.com/node/118

Pigs; good or bad? That is the question!

Last time, I talked about “Dogs in Chinese eyes”. As the pig year is coming, I now will talk about the pig.

A pig ironically has a dual image - both positive and negative in Chinese culture. On one hand, pig represents people who are sloppy, lazy, greedy and dirty. On the other hand, pig also represents good luck and wealth. This year is strongly believed to be the “year of the golden pig” which returns every 60 years. People believe children born this year will be blessed with good luck and financial wealth. As wedding halls were crowded in 2006, maternity hospitals are expected to be packed in 2007.

Despite people’s strong belief about the “year of the golden pig”, all of the limited idioms about pig in Chinese are bad meanings.

Here is the most famous saying about pig in china:
“ren2pa4chu1ming2zhu1pa4zhuang4” which literally means pigs are afraid to be fat and people are afraid to be famous. If pig is fat enough, it will be killed. If a person gets famous, he/she will get involved with a lot of troubles. This saying is deeply rooted in the Chinese philosophy of “zhong1yong1” (the “golden mean” of the Confucian school) which is the way of wisdom and safety between extremes; sufficiency without excess; moderation.

What do pigs represent in your country? Write to us and tell us some stories.

Student trip to the Spring Festival flower market

Spring Festival is just around the corner and to learn a little about Chinese customs New Concept Mandarin is organising a student trip to one of the Flower Markets on Thursday 15th February @ 3pm. Students can meet at our training centre and then our teachers will accompany you to one of the flower markets. We will make you speak Chinese along the way so a good chance to practice bargaining for some flowers.

A Chinese New Year without flowers is like Christmas with no tree, so from 15th February until 2am on 18th February (the first day of the Lunar Calendar) each of the districts in Guangzhou has a flower market. The markets are also a great a place to soak in the festive season and see the locals gleefully choosing flowers for their homes. Different flowers convey different meanings and unless you have had your eyes closed for the last few days you will have noticed orange plants appearing on many street corners. Orange plants signify luck and wealth as in Cantonese the words have a similar pronunciation and also their shape resembles a piece of gold.

For now, Happy New Year.... Or Xin Nian Kuai Le!

Choosing the right language

What do you call someone who speaks three languages? - - Trilingual
What do you call someone who speaks two languages? - - Bilingual
What do you call someone who speaks one language? - - British!

For most Brits learning another language usually means dabbling with French and German at school then stopping there. It is easy to blame our lack of enthusiasm for languages on history, laziness, being an island race or simply that English is the ‘world’ language. Why do we need to learn a different language? Why learn French? Or German? They should speak English, shouldn't they?!!!

Maybe all along it was more a question of choosing the right language. Over the last few years the UK has witnessed a huge demand for the Chinese language, and not just at university level, but right down to primary schools. It might not be overtaking French and German just yet, but as we can see from recent stories in the news, the numbers studying Mandarin are on the up. Here are a couple of interesting articles:
http://education.guardian.co.uk/egweekly/story/0,,1698082,00.html

http://english.ohmynews.com/articleview/article_view.asp?at_code=386448

Working for New Concept Mandarin I am bound to say that mastering Chinese brings great benefits, but now the world is saying the same!! This trend is not only in the UK, but all over the world so there will be more to post soon, but for now, choose Mandarin!!

4 tones in Mandarin

After reading my first two blogs, if you haven’t studied any Chinese, you may wonder what the numbers are behind the pinyin. Well, let me explain it to you in this blog.

Chinese is a tonal language. Mandarin, the official Chinese language, has four tones and a neutral tone. The first tone is a high, level tone. That is when we put a number 1 after the pinyin. It sounds like when singing the note "la". The second tone is a rising tone. That is when we put a number 2 after the pinyin. It sounds like "far" when asking "Is it far?" The third tone is a falling-and-rising tone that starts mid-low, moves to the bottom of your voice and then rises to the middle. That is when we put a number 3 after the pinyin. It sounds like when you say "so?" irritably. The fourth tone is a falling tone. That is when we put a number 4 after the pinyin. It sounds like when you adamantly saying "No!".

If you are interested to find more information about the tones, please click here, you will get a better understanding.

Dogs in Chinese eyes

For western calendar, it is already a new year. But for most traditional Chinese, our time is still lingering around the end of the year of the Dog. Dog is always loved by foreigners. You can tell by looking at the English idioms about dogs:
“Big dog” which means very important person.
“Love me, love my dog” which means if you love someone, you should accept everything and everyone that person loves.

Well, in china, dogs don’t have so good reputation. The idioms in Chinese about dogs are normally bad:
Gou3ji2tiao4qiang2 which literally means an irritated dog will jump over the wall. Now it is normally used to describe that a desperate person will do anything or something dangerous.
Gou3zui3li3tu3bu2chu1xiang4ya2 which literally means that it’s impossible for a dog to spit out an ivory. Now it is normally used to describe that a bad person has filthy mouth and he can’t say anything decent.

There are still a lot more idioms about dogs in Chinese. Though none of them has good meaning but at least that means dogs are still very close to people’s life. Now do you think you know more about the dogs in Chinese eyes? My next blog will be about the next year’s animal: “pig”, the controversial animal. Do you think piggy is cute? Do you think piggy is dirty? Wait for my next blog.

Company outing turns Chinglish

Recently we had our company outing in Qingyue, a hot spring place about a one hour drive away from Guangzhou. On the program there where great activities like seeing the “far between” plants, some “sliding” as well as some serious “field operations”. Huh? Wonder what that is? Me too. Those readers who are living in China know the funny situation where they discover signs or menus in restaurants that offer delicious menus like a “Good to eat mountain” or a “The farmer is small to fry king” plate (found on: http://rahoi.com/2006/03/may-i-take-your-order.php).

Like the Xinhua News Agency tells us in October 15, 2006, the city of Beijing is now, certainly in preparation for the millions of foreign visitors coming to the Olympic games in 2008, trying to standardize use of English on public signs (http://www.china.org.cn/english/2006/Oct/183982.htm). Well, I would say it is about time, guys. Hopefully other cities like Guangzhou and Shenzhen will follow this good example?

Bringing learning to life

With our online courses we bring learning to life..... Not convinced? Read some of the comments Michelle Duncan, one of our Survival students, made about some of the stories in our Functional Study section.

In the General Mandarin units -

I'm convinced Brian is really a girl

Jerry has no body in one scene

Sometimes Holly has no face

George has no personality

Jill's a whiner baby (especially level 2 unit 5)

Level 2 Unit 6 is just sad, sad, sad

Jerry sounds like the turtle ("dude") in Finding Nemo

The General Mandarin section of the online course has stories to present the language using our Mixed-Code method. To learn more about our online courses click here.

Does your room have a name?

The idea of naming each of the 5 classrooms has been brought up a long time ago. We came up with loads of ideas, such as countries’ names, numbers, flowers, festivals, etc. But none of them can give us the feeling of “yes, that is the name we want!!” We want the name to be easy, related to Chinese culture, at the same time the students can use them in their daily life. One meeting, we came up with the idea of Chinese historical places, such as the Great Wall, the Forbidden City. We tried to find some famous historical places in the south, but most of these places are in Beijing. None of them were in Guangzhou. So we were stuck again.

One day, on the bus back home, one idea strike me like a lightening. Why don’t we use the 5 elements? In Chinese it is called “wu3 xing2” which is a basic component of the unique Chinese culture. The five elements are wood (mu4), fire (huo3), earth (tu3), metal (jin1) and water (shui3). Each of these elements symbolizes a particular category of things or motions. They are the basic substances necessary for life. At the same time, they are promoting and restricting each other. Aren’t them the perfect names for the rooms? I was very excited about my thought.

The next day, the first thing I did was to tell our Center Manager my idea. He agreed and so did the other teachers.

So now if you walk into our office, you can walk in the shui3 room or the jin1room. That’s the whole story to name our rooms. Do you have better ideas?

Santa Pub Crawl - 8th Dec

Backing up to before the New Year and Guangzhou had its yearly Santa Pub Crawl. A turn out of somewhere near to 150 guys and girls dressed up as Santa (or Father Christmas for the Brits). From bar to bar, drink to drink, we headed around the city spreading merry greetings.

With a mix of all nationalities it was a truely international xmas gathering that I was invited to and in turn invited the NCM students to. I never knew Santa was a beer drinker!! HoHoHo!!