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 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:

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.