Cantonese II Class Summary, Insights, Homework for Saturday, October 28, 2017

Hi Everyone (all 4 of you who attended class this past Saturday 😐),

Alas, I don't think this is going to become a permanent class. Based on our 4 student attendance last Saturday, most likely our next class will be our last.

PLEASE REMEMBER THAT I WILL NOT BE TEACHING NEXT SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 4, BECAUSE I WILL BE OUT OF TOWN.

OUR FOLLOWING AND PROBABLY FINAL CLASS WILL BE SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 11, 2017 AT 5:30 PM.

CLASS SUMMARY:

This past weekend, we finished reviewing the grammar points for lesson 16, the first lesson in our book, and then we spent most of the class doing the drills beginning on page 12. After trying several repetition methods, we settled on each student reading both the left and right examples for each item, one at a time, going around the room for each drill exercise. We covered a fair amount of material, each student having a chance to read and then read/respond to several examples of each of the grammar points discussed in the drills.

We saw that some students were better than others at reading the Yale romanization. It takes a bit of time to learn, but once you learn it, you will have it going forward, to be used with whatever book Hung decides to teach from for the rest of the year, as well as in any other class at ALESN going forward that might use Yale romanization to teach Cantonese.

INSIGHTS:

Not many this week.

Just that certain students are able to pronounce the Yale syllables and tones with relative ease while others are getting really stuck, in spite of the fact that their Cantonese is actually much better than mine. My suggestion to any student struggling with Yale pronunciation and tones would be to go to the same website link that I provided earlier in this section of the blog and download BOOK 1 and its mp3s from this same FSI Cantonese Basic Course textbook series. 

Once you have downloaded the PDF and audio files for book one, read the entire introduction and lesson 1 to that book AND LISTEN TO THE MP3 FOR LESSON 1 WHILE READING ALONG IN THE BOOK. This will teach you everything you could possibly need to know about how to read and pronounce Yale romanization, as long as you pay attention and listen critically as you read along in the text while the speakers on the mp3 read from the book. This should fix anyone's inability to read and pronounce Yale romanized Chinese -- especially for words that you guys already know!

In addition to this, I would go on Youtube and search for tutorial videos teaching how to pronounce Yale romanized Cantonese. They must be out there. If you find any good ones, please email me the links.

HOMEWORK:

Since this is most likely going to be a 4-week workshop instead of a year-long course, I am not going to assign anymore homework, other than this:

LEARN TO READ AND PRONOUNCE YALE ROMANIZED CANTONESE BY FOLLOWING MY 2 SUGGESTIONS ABOVE IF YOU CANNOT ALREADY READ YALE. 

You will need to be able to read and pronounce Yale romanized Cantonese in Hung's Saturday class as well -- especially if you want to learn at home on your own between classes by reading all of the many, many pages that Hung skips when teaching from the book that he uses!

If a miracle happens and we suddenly have 15 students in our Cantonese 2 class on November 11, you will definitely need to be able to read Yale going forward if this class continues for the rest of the year -- though as I mentioned above, that seems unlikely at this point.

Many thanks to everyone who has been taking this new class, and see you all in 2 weeks on November 11.