第六十三天

[nnozomi]

第七天！一个星期怎么这么快。No grammar points today, post something you like in Chinese (a song, a poem, a drama quotation, a useful study thing, a painting, something funny, you name it).

Mine: since someone brought up Chao Yuen Ren last week, here is one of his many interesting quotations (this one both Chinese linguistic-related and a bit 耽美-avant-la-lettre, although he didn't mean it that way).

In Dora Black's lectures [in 1920 in China], she mentioned the problem of marriage. At one of her lectures she mentioned "those young men and women who are not married." Since "to marry" in Chinese takes a different word whether it's a man or a woman, I had to translate by different verbs. But I twisted them around using the wrong verb and came out with something which would sound like "those young men who have no husbands and those young women who have no wives," and the audience, of course, roared with laughter. When Miss Black asked me what they were laughing about, I told her [whispered] "It'll take too long to explain; I'll have to explain to you afterwards." Ch'ü is the verb literally "to take," to marry by a man, and chia, literally "to go home," is a verb to marry on the part of a woman.

(Thank goodness we can just say 结婚 these days. I think the first verb must be 娶, which I had to look up, and the second one 嫁...)

Starting around tomorrow I hope to institute a slightly new format, adding some vocabulary along with grammar (so people can choose to practice either or both as preferred) and maybe doing one masterpost/review and one "share something fun" 第七天 on alternate weeks. Keep letting me know how it looks. 辛苦了或加油！

Comments

[yaaurens]

I come bearing an update on some of the new apps I've been trying out!

HanBook is actually pretty cool, even if you can't access the guided lessons without paying for premium. I did get to do one of those before they locked it down, and while it was super basic, I liked how they were presenting the lesson, so if I ever have money to pay for another app, it may be this one. Even the free parts are useful! They have these Word Books that you can go through, vocabulary words and phrases that they show you on their own and then in some sort of contextual sentence. They have reading, writing, and quizzes, and get this: THEY GRADE YOUR SPEAKING! It's not super detailed, but they give you a sense of how you're doing, which is very nice. And they also have really good videos on pronunciation!

I also started playing with Speekoo, which has a neat concept, wherein each level takes you to a different city in China and as you pass lessons you get fun fact cards about that city (I'm currently in Chengdu, so many of the facts are about pandas!). One thing I really like about it is how GOOD the audio recording is; it's all very high quality and you can really hear the tones and pronunciation. However, they don't use proper pinyin, as there's no tone markers, and no 汉子 which seems very odd to me. But it's definitely good for listening since the recordings are so well done.

Side note: I'm also using FunEasyLearn, but not for Mandarin, although they do have Mandarin. That one also has a premium feature, but gives you the option of earning points by doing lessons in order to unlock those features. Since I haven't used it for Mandarin, I can't speak to how good that part is, but I like the way it works for Croatian - and they have both simplified and traditional options available!

[nnozomi]

Thank you for the rundown! HanBook and Speekoo both sound promising (I'm really tempted by the city part, that sounds like my thing, and by the HanBook Word Books). Very much appreciated!

[yaaurens]

I'm not sure how advanced Speekoo is going to get, I think it's still under construction, but I do like getting all my little facts! I've moved to Guilin, I think it was?