A Little Chinese Lesson

After living in China for almost two years, I finally downloaded a Chinese typing program onto my laptop!

I've been taking Mandarin Chinese classes at That's Mandarin for the past couple of months. Progress has been slow, but at least it gives me an excuse to practice and attempt to immerse myself in the language. Unfortunately, because all of my coworkers' English are quite good, I've gotten lazy with learning Chinese.

Anyway，the course has an interesting twist. Instead of giving you a textbook and making you memorize loads of boring characters, That's Mandarin relies on other media i.e. TV, radio, etc. to teach Chinese. In a way it's perfect for the lazy student that I am, plus it makes things more relevant and interesting.

I started off the course by watching a TV series, 别了，温哥华。It's a story about a woman who tries to escape from her psycho boyfriend by running off to Vancouver, Canada. The story lines are a bit cheesy, but the drama is actually pretty interesting, and the characters speak slowly enough for you to understand.

Yesterday's topics during class were 1) the riots in Xinjiang and 2) the Beijing Guoans, China's football team.

Here's a couple of vocabulary words to get us started:

维族和汉族 (wei2zu2he2han4zu2)= Uighurs and Han Chinese

倒霉 (dao3mei2)= bad luck

他们没什么反应 (ta1men0mei2shen2me0fan3ying4)= They didn't show much of a reaction.

踢足球 (ti1zu2qiu2)= FOOTBALL!

超级大国 (chao1ji2da4guo2) = A superpower nation

超级铁杆粉丝都很激动 (chao1ji2tie3gan3fen3si1dou1hen3ji1dong4)= This celebrity's fans (context: we were watching a talk show with Andy Lau in it) were very excited.

别提中国很伤心的事了! (bie2ti2zhong1guo2hen3shang1xin1de0shi4le0)= Don't bring up one of China's sore subjects! Context: We were talking about the Beijing Guoan football team. Apparently, the football team receives the most amount of funding compared to China's other sports teams, but the Beijing Guoans are well, embarassingly bad. As a result, don't bring up one of China's sore subjects.

非死不可 (fei4si3bu4ke3)= The latest talk on the web. Facebook has been shut down here because of this (whether it's true or not, we don't know). People are calling Facebook 非死不可 because the words sound similar to the English pronunciation, but it also means "we must destroy everything".

脸谱 (lian3pu3) = The real Chinese name for Facebook