Learning Chinese
I decided to learn Chinese. Yes, I realize it is one of the hardest, if not THE hardest language to learn. So - why did I choose it?
For the past 10 months, I have been teaching English to Chinese children online. This job has been a joy and an eye-opener too. I have learned a lot about the Chinese people and their culture.
For instance, one of my students has a new baby brother. When I asked Baby's name, my twelve-year-old student did not know. Or maybe he just didn't know what to say. So, I did a bit of research and, from what I can tell, new babies are not given public names. I think Baby gets a name that only the parents use. One source calls this a "milk name" which is generally abandoned after Baby is officially named. Seems that everyone else just calls the child Baby, or Baobao in Chinese.
My interest was piqued just a few months into my new endeavor. I wanted to be able to understand!
Since I can only speak English to my students, I cannot use them as a resource for learning the new language. So, I looked for some free resources to help me decide if this is something I can really do.
The first tool I used was an app called HelloChinese. This app received good reviews and was fun to use. I used it for a few months but realized that the hardest part of learning Chinese was reading it. The Chinese characters, or hànzì, are difficult to learn. It was very daunting. I'd been studying casually for weeks and was making no progress in memorizing any characters. The app had me drawing characters, which I did faithfully. However, it wasn't sticking. The characters were complicated. Some had as many as 13 strokes!
I watched a Ted Talk video on how some of the characters relate to the meaning of the words. However, many more do not relate at all. So, this helped me only a little.
A few weeks ago, I got a notification that a language program I'd used for Spanish review - Duolingo - had just released their Mandarin language option. I was excited! I knew I liked how the program worked. So I checked it out. I've been using it regularly for several weeks. Now, I'm learning the characters!
The program doesn't have me draw the characters, but match them with the spoken syllable it represents. I also have to decode sentences written in hànzì. Is it difficult? Yes, it is. There are very few characters I can recognize right now. One of them is wo - 我 - wŏ, which is the pronoun I.
However, I think that Hello Chinese is strong in the areas that Duolingo is not, and vice versa. So, I think I will be using both of them as time progresses.
Someday I want to visit China. I would be so pleased to be able to communicate in the language, even if only a little.
For the past 10 months, I have been teaching English to Chinese children online. This job has been a joy and an eye-opener too. I have learned a lot about the Chinese people and their culture.
For instance, one of my students has a new baby brother. When I asked Baby's name, my twelve-year-old student did not know. Or maybe he just didn't know what to say. So, I did a bit of research and, from what I can tell, new babies are not given public names. I think Baby gets a name that only the parents use. One source calls this a "milk name" which is generally abandoned after Baby is officially named. Seems that everyone else just calls the child Baby, or Baobao in Chinese.
My interest was piqued just a few months into my new endeavor. I wanted to be able to understand!
Since I can only speak English to my students, I cannot use them as a resource for learning the new language. So, I looked for some free resources to help me decide if this is something I can really do.
The first tool I used was an app called HelloChinese. This app received good reviews and was fun to use. I used it for a few months but realized that the hardest part of learning Chinese was reading it. The Chinese characters, or hànzì, are difficult to learn. It was very daunting. I'd been studying casually for weeks and was making no progress in memorizing any characters. The app had me drawing characters, which I did faithfully. However, it wasn't sticking. The characters were complicated. Some had as many as 13 strokes!
I watched a Ted Talk video on how some of the characters relate to the meaning of the words. However, many more do not relate at all. So, this helped me only a little.
A few weeks ago, I got a notification that a language program I'd used for Spanish review - Duolingo - had just released their Mandarin language option. I was excited! I knew I liked how the program worked. So I checked it out. I've been using it regularly for several weeks. Now, I'm learning the characters!
The program doesn't have me draw the characters, but match them with the spoken syllable it represents. I also have to decode sentences written in hànzì. Is it difficult? Yes, it is. There are very few characters I can recognize right now. One of them is wo - 我 - wŏ, which is the pronoun I.
However, I think that Hello Chinese is strong in the areas that Duolingo is not, and vice versa. So, I think I will be using both of them as time progresses.
Someday I want to visit China. I would be so pleased to be able to communicate in the language, even if only a little.
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