Aquedita Triglot Senior Member Poland myspace.com/aqueda_v Joined 6011 days ago 154 posts - 164 votes Speaks: Polish*, English, Japanese Studies: Mandarin
| Message 9 of 12 05 November 2008 at 12:49pm | IP Logged |
Jee: thank you so much for the comment, it's so sweet of you! :)
Oh my gosh, what a week!
Yesterday my teacher prised my progress in Chinese and my pronunciation and admitted that she was sure I will survive in China. Good to know, hahaha! I was so damn proud of myself :D I lend her my new textbooks, hope I'll get them back later this week!
Also I started an account at http://dontbreakthechain.com/ to report any day I do something with my Chinese. Just a small motivation trick. I'll copy the progress report every month here.
And to spice things up - today our teacher brought a native speaker from Canton to our class and we were suppose to talk to him, hahaha :D But luckily, he was polite enough to speak slowly and clearly and not to make fun of our poor skills :P He helped us with our pronunciation. I asked some good questions - he did understand me and what's more important, I was able to understood his replies, yeah!
I'm kind of tired now but at the same time so driven to do more in terms of my Chinese studies. motivation is the one thing I'm not lacking at all ;) I have to start getting all the documents ready for my scholarship application quite soon.
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Mistral Diglot Senior Member Poland Joined 5926 days ago 160 posts - 179 votes 1 sounds Speaks: Polish*, English Studies: Mandarin, German
| Message 10 of 12 18 November 2008 at 3:00pm | IP Logged |
I co tu tak cicho? :(
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Monox D. I-Fly Senior Member Indonesia monoxdifly.iopc.us Joined 5132 days ago 762 posts - 664 votes Speaks: Indonesian*
| Message 11 of 12 06 May 2016 at 2:16pm | IP Logged |
Aquedita wrote:
I'm so glad I finally have a Chinese name. It's 姫 天舞(Ji TianWu) and I love it, I think it's perfect and suits me well.
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Based on the Kanji, I concludes that "Ji" means "princess" and "Tian" means "heaven". What does "Wu" mean?
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shk00design Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 4441 days ago 747 posts - 1123 votes Speaks: Cantonese*, English, Mandarin Studies: French
| Message 12 of 12 07 May 2016 at 1:27pm | IP Logged |
maya_star17 wrote:
I could be wrong, but I think that people in Shanghai speak a different/separate "dialect" called Shanghainese... so it might not be the best place to practice Mandarin ): |
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In China you can practically speak Mandarin anywhere. In school the core subjects are taught in Mandarin so you should have no trouble getting around in Mandarin. It is true that every province in China has its distinctive sets of dialects and sub-dialects. But even in a province like Guangdong, you normally expect people to speak Cantonese but you can still get around with Mandarin quite easily. Except in neighboring Hong Kong & Macao you can get around with Mandarin but the locals prefer to speak Cantonese and some may not be very fluent in Mandarin.
Writing and recognizing the characters is not easy. Many people can recognize characters in text (newspaper, online, etc.) but can't always recall how to write some of them. Learning the characters take a lot of practice. Depending on the frequency you come across them, there are always characters you see in a newspaper or magazine that you don't know. Personally I prefer reading news articles online because I can Cut & Paste characters to an online dictionary to get the meaning.
I use an online dictionary MDBG. You can enter a character or a word in English to get the correct meaning. Beside the meaning in English, there is an arrow you can open a list of options. There is a speaker button to listen to the pronunciation.
www.MDBG.net
A Chinese lady Shaolan developed a method a few years ago for learning Chinese characters called Chineasy. Her approach is for Simplified Chinese characters. Anybody who is learning Chinese and not familiar with Chineasy can watch the video demo below:
Learn to read Chinese
Good luck...
Edited by shk00design on 07 May 2016 at 1:36pm
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