Here’as an overview of this week’s lessons and what you can expect to learn.
Monday Oct 31st: Lesson 31 “Tones, Part II”
We’ve had a lot of requests about the tones, and so we’ve put together another podcast on this subject (the last one was #10, for those of you who want to go through the archive and listen to old releases). In this podcast, we’ll show you how a change to the tones can make a major change to the meaning (for example, the difference between “the orient” and “the bedroom”!).
Tuesday, Nov 1st: Lesson 32 “I Know You”
This is another podcast about describing people, and this one introduces the useful phrase “I heard that you are (American)”, allowing you toreport information.
Wednesday 2nd: Lesson 33 “I Gotta Go, Babe”
At the end of a pleasant evening with a Chinese host, you’ll obviously want to make your excuses as politely as possible. In this podcast you’ll listen to a typical situation played out in a dialogue, and see how call it a night smoothly.
Thursday 3rd: Lesson 34 “Family Ties”
Another lesson on describing the family, and in this one we will hear a how the word “have” can appear in a number of different ways in a sentence.
Friday 4th: Lesson 35 ” Don’t Take That Tone With Me!”
In this lesson, by popular request, we will take a look at the differences between three Asian languages - Mandarin, Shanghainese, and Cantonese. You’ll see that there are significant similarities between different Chinese dialects, just as there are between European languages. You’ll also hear how the pronunciation can vary between them.
Steve Williams
Could we possibly have an advanced number lesson at some point? Covering hundreds, thousands, ten-thousands, millions, fractions, decimals etc.
Bazza,
Yes. We can do that. Chinese speakers of English have huge problems with this - the systems for large numbers are different. Let me figure out how to make an interesting lessson out of numbers.
Are you chaps interested in ‘business Chinese’? How about if we cover that?
I think a lesson on the use of ‘what are you doing’ 你干吗？ ni gan ma, would be quite good for basics. It was passed over in one lesson while I was studying abroad, get here and it’s thrown around all over the place.