中文 - Zhōngwén - Chinese Class
Second Chinese class last night and I, well, to be honest, kicked ASS. My pronounciation is slowly building strength, thanks in great part to the CD’s I purchased that are the companion for our book. Already I’m beginning to hear the tones and get a feel for the vowels. Pinyin, the romanization of Chinese pronounciation, has a few nuances that are somewhat tricky to deal with, but it’s not too difficult.
We moved from initials, the first part of a word, to finals. Final sounds can take the five tones just like initials. things like -an, -en, -ang, -eng, -ong. With an initial “t” sound, that becomes tan, ten, tang, teng, tong. We reviewed 19 finals, combined with initials, for around 144 sounds…times five tones is some scary number I don’t want to think about.
Basically all we are doing right now is getting our mouths used to the sounds. We played a game where someone would read the word, and we had to write it down on a small plastic sheet with a dry-erase marker. Then we held up what we heard and the teacher wrote down our responses, and read them all to the class. I was 10 for 10, and didn’t miss a single one.
Then she moved onto writing. The basic strokes, and the basics of character construction. Since I can write Japanese, this was nothing new to me at all. The character building rules are exactly the same from Japanese, so there wasn’t much to learn there.
For homework, we were given a sheet with 10 radicals and instructed to learn them. They are as follows:
人 rén person
刀 dāo knife
力 lì power
又 yòu right hand
口 kŏu mouth
囗 wéi enclose
土 tǔ earth
夕 xī sunset
大 dà big
女 nǚ woman