ALESN Mandarin I Class summary and notes from Monday night, 3/11/19 Class -- sorry for delay

Hi Gang,

Sorry for my delay in sending this. Luckily for me, we covered some material that I taught last year, so I will once again paste a blog entry from last year for you all to reference this weekend before next Monday night's class.

This past Monday, we backtracked a bit and covered the Lesson 2 Dialogue 2 grammar point DOU1 (both or all) on pages 53 and 54. These were very important points that we did not cover the previous week before moving onto Lesson 3 Dialogue 1. Here, again, is a blog entry covering this grammar point:

http://www.sayitrightchinese.com/2018/01/mandarin-i-alesn-thursday-january-18.html

Following this, we went over the vocabulary and dialogue for Lesson 3 Dialogue 1, covered by this blog entry from last year. You guys broke up into small groups and ran the dialogue and I think that everyone did ok with it -- there were some questions, but everyone seemed comfortable with the new material:

• Remember that in Chinese, the names of the 12 months are simply the word for the number 1 through 12 plus the word for "month." Thus, the word for September, the 9th month out of the year, is JIU3YUE4, literally "9 month."
• Though not discussed yet, please remember that when we mention any quantity of any noun in Chinese, we need to insert a measure word between the quantity and the noun. This will hold true when speaking about "9 months" as in, "9 months ago" or "he has studied Chinese for 9 months," which would be JIU3 GE YUE4: 4 measure word month. We will cover this eventually, but I am mentioning it now so you can keep in in mind.
• We will learn all of the numbers from zero to 99 or 100 starting next week, which will create a system for you to memorize many of the new vocabulary words from Lesson 3 Dialogue 1.
• The weekly calendar in Chinese begins with Monday, which is considered the first day of each week. Monday through Saturday are simply called, "WEEK [day] ONE," etc. up to "WEEK [day] SIX." There will be a separate term for Sunday, which we will learn next week.
• Obviously, when discussing when someone's birthday is, we need to be able to say the terms for various days, dates, days of the week, etc. That covers some of the new vocabulary words from this lesson.
• Talking about age using SUI4. We will discuss more of this and see more examples next week.
• Various vocabulary terms for telling time, which we will see more of next week in the grammar points for this lesson and dialogue. Please review what we have covered so far and be ready to continue with our discussion of telling time next Monday.
• Finally, we covered the table on page 70 for the numbers from 1 through 99. PLEASE REVIEW THIS TABLE AND BE READY TO TALK ABOUT IT ON MONDAY.

We will pick up on Monday with this table/chart. Remember that there is a whole system with a chart/table and once you memorize the system (and once you PRACTICE...), you will be able to easily say any number from 1 to 99!

See you all on Monday. Again, sorry for the delay in sending this out.