Hi Gang,
Last week, we reviewed the simple
finals, the BO PO MO FO table, and then we approached the bo po mo fo
consonants using various simple finals in the exercises on pages 2, 3,
and 4 of your textbook. A lot of time to cover such little material,
right? Actually, these are the most basic building blocks of Mandarin
Chinese, the legos of Chinese, and must be learned before we can move on
to anything more substantial.
We
will continue covering this material tomorrow in class, moving through
lines 5 and 6 of the bo po mo fo table, as expanded upon on page 5 of
the book, to the COMPOUND FINALS, which we will begin to cover during
tomorrow night's lesson. Remember that I told you all that lines 4, 5,
and 6 of the bo po mo fo table will separate the good students from the
struggling or quitting students. This is true -- I promise you...if you
haven't already begun to feel this yourselves as you have been reviewing
the material so far.
I know this is slow going. The beginning stages of
every language are slow and tedious, but never boring if your heart is
in the right place and your motivations are true enough to carry you
through. Please remember this if you get discouraged at any time. I
wasn't able to email earlier last week with any homework, but I
assume you all realize that if I don't tell you, it simply means that
your homework is to review the material we covered during our last class,
right? I did mention that everyone in the class is always welcome to
send me emails, etc. expressing concerns, asking questions, asking for
hints or help with any problem pronunciation issues...Only one or two
students emailed me over the past week, and that was simply to apologize
for missing class. Please contact me anytime with any questions about
what we are covering in class, or if you come across something on your
own, on Youtube, etc., that confuses you -- or even better, which you
think might benefit your classmates, which I am happy to share, giving
you full credit for the discovery, of course.
Cool...
I will be copying and pasting all of the emails I have sent you all so
far this fall AND GOING FORWARD for the rest of the year, into my blog
that I maintained for my ALESN classes last year. I will redo the home
page accordingly, so people will know that the blog is back on. I don't
know that I will be adding new audio or video content or links this year
like I did last year, but soon all of the information will be there for
my current students in a logical, searchable, reverse chronological
order standard to most blogs. The website address for the blog is
www.sayitrightchinese.com
. It is an active blog and you can click on the link right now. I hope
to upload all of your recent class emails sometime today or tomorrow.
They will show up as blog entries for whatever day I upload them, which
is why I will reference the original email date in the title of the blog
entry.
Next, I want to share a link provided by our Admin Guru Tsz Fong from San Francisco State University's Modern Language Lab:
In
this link, you will find literally everything you could possibly need
OR WANT for my class (book, audio and video-wise). The video in this
link is higher quality than what I originally sent you from URI. You
might want to redownload the DVD video for Level 1 Part 1 from this new
link. I am not sure how long they are going to keep the link active, so please visit and download what you want asap.
In a related topic, beginning in the next few weeks, I
will be offering private tutoring for beginning Cantonese and Mandarin
students specifically focusing on proper pronunciation and tones while
reading from either Yale Romanization or Jyut Ping Romanization for
Cantonese, or from Pinyin for Mandarin. If anyone is interested, please
let me know. I am in the process of determining my rates and lesson
location logistics. I will also be offering Skype lessons if commuting
is an issue for anyone. I had one private student via Skype and email
last year who lived in Cleveland, who found me via my blog, which was
pretty cool. I corresponded with him and had 3 or 4 marathon email/web
lessons over a period of maybe 4-5 months. It was a rewarding experience
for both of us. I got to help him with some research I did for him on
specific uses of certain Cantonese final particles (which we have not
covered yet) and I benefited not only because he paid me for the
lessons, but because I learned almost as much as my student from the
research that I did for him. It was this experience that made me want to
offer private tutoring as an option for my ALESN students and for
anyone else going forward.
All lessons will
be 1-2 hours long and will of course focus on any relevant chapter
lesson material and dialogues, vocabulary from the textbook, etc. -- if I
am tutoring an ALESN student. The niche focus of my tutoring
services will be accurate pronunciation of the syllables and tones of
basic Cantonese and Mandarin Chinese within a window of what is
acceptable and comprehensible to a native speaker who doesn't know you,
who is in a hurry, who doesn't care about you at all, and yet will be
able to understand you the first or second time you say something, so
that the student can communicate effectively whatever you are trying to
communicate.
I want to be clear that I am not fluent in either Cantonese or Mandarin, and I have never claimed to be.
I pronounce both dialects with a thick white person accent, and I still
have A LOT to learn vocabulary-wise...BUT, when I go to Hong Kong and
China and I open my mouth, real, understandable, functional basic
Cantonese and Mandarin sounds come out. There is no need for charades,
and if I don't know how to say something, I am able to ask in Cantonese or Mandarin
how to say the thing that I don't know the words for...and then the
conversation continues. I am usually understood the very first time I
speak, by people who don't know me, who are in a hurry, who don't give a
shit about my life or what I am trying to ask them or talk about.
I
would like to help each and everyone of you get to that point -- either
in class, or with some private help if one hour a week isn't cutting it
for you. Some of you will get there on your own because you have a
great ear, a lot of time, a solid study ethic, and a deep, emotionalized
motivation -- as we have mentioned several times now. Other students
will need more help or even hand holding. I am not very good at hand holding in class at ALESN, which is why some current and former students think I am an asshole.
Hand holding at ALESN is not something I have time or patience for,
given the very limited windows of time we have together once a week for a
limited number of weeks each academic year. THIS is why I am starting
to do private tutoring for students who genuinely want to be able to
speak Chinese but whose current pronunciation is, for lack of a better
word, "bad." One on one tutoring allows for a lot of hand holding, if
that is what a given student needs.
As the
weeks or months go by, if any of you feels like you need extra help with
pronouncing the fundamental syllabic and tonal building blocks of basic
Cantonese or Mandarin -- the legos of Chinese -- please consider hiring
me as your tutor. Thanks in advance.
See you all tomorrow,
Brendan
No comments:
Post a Comment
If you leave me a spam comment, it will immediately be removed. I will never EVER leave your comment in place on my blog. It will be permanently deleted in minutes.