Le Nouvel an chinois

Voici une photo de moi et deux enfants de mon amie. On patine sur la glace autour du grand palais chinois (nommé The Forbidden City) à Beijing en 2005.

Joyeux Nouvel an chinois, tout le monde! J’ai habité en Chine pendant trois ans et j’ai beaucoup aimé cette fête, qui s’appelle aussi le festival du printemps. Tout le monde passe beaucoup de temps avec leur famille pendant ce festival et on joue avec les feux d’artifice (fire works) et on mange des jiaozi (dumplings). Beaucoup de personnes donnent des enveloppes rouges avec de l’argent aux enfants.

Il y a 12 animaux qui vont avec le Nouvel an chinois.  Cette année c’est l’année du singe (monkey).

Si tu es en sixième année, tu es probablement né dans l’année du singe (monkey).
Si tu es en cinquième année, tu es probablement né dans l’année du coq (rooster).
Si tu es en quatrième année, tu es probablement né dans l’année du chien.

Pour en savoir plus des signes astrologiques, clique ici.

 

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Our Last Mandarin Class

This club was a great experience for me and Sarah (AKA, Zong Laoshi) and I hope it was for the kids too!

We celebrated our last class with a new flashcard game, eating rice with chopsticks, and watching a video of ourselves… In China! (As soon as I can figure out how to post it on the blog, I will!)

A big thank you to Wendy Maxwell and the AIM team for providing the materials, to Sylvia Duckworth for the many digital files, and to Jen Shirley and the SMPS daycare for providing the space.  Special shout outs as well (of course!) to my co-teacher, Sarah Zong (Xiaohua) and all of our Mandarin Club students!

Zaijian!
Zhou Laoshi

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Did it!  Most of these videos are from our second class, with only 30minutes of Mandarin under our belts.

Enjoy!

Our Second Mandarin Lesson

Today we learned the Mandarin words for boy, girl, he, she, jump, run, walk, stop and listen. Do you remember any of them? Some of them sound very similar to each other! We will be working more on our tones next class.

Also, this week, every student received a yellow folder with lyrics to our song and a list of all of the words we have learned so far. Please make sure to bring your yellow folder to school every Monday. You can also practice a little at home or during your free time at school.

Thanks for another fun week!

Zhou laoshi and Zong laoshi

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Mandarin Club – First Lesson

Wow!  This was so much fun!  

Do you remember any of the words and sentences that we learned?  We will keep practising and building our vocabulary every class. I can’t wait until next Monday!20151130-164614.jpg

 

20151203-123010.jpg*Yikes!  I spotted a mistake on one of these cards! On the middle card in the third row from the bottom, the second word should be xiàlai, with a x (which is pronounced like sh in English). 

Here is a quick breakdown of how to pronounce « pinyin », i.e. Mandarin written with English letters:

Consonants:
c = English ts (as in « hats »)

q = English ch (as in « cheat »)
r = something between American r and French j)
x = English sh (as in « sheet »)
z = English ds (as in « fads »)
zh = English j (as in « Joe »; not like French j!)

Vowels:
i after h or r = English r (as in « grr »)
i after s, c, z = English z (as in « bzzzz »)
i elsewhere = English ee (as in « beet »)
ian or yan = English yen (as in ¥)
ui = English way (as in « lost his way »)
u after q, j, x, or y = French u or German ü (Arrange your lips to say oo as in “goo” and then try to say ee as in “see.”)
u elsewhere = English oo (as in « pooh »)
ü or yu = French u or German ü (place your lips to say oo and try to say ee)