Last night I had a Pimsleur nightmare. It began benignly enough, with the discovery that my New York City cab driver and then also his fellow cab driver friend, who materialized in my dream without logical explanation, were totally familiar…
Dear Readers, I am still working on Chinese, and my silence on the subject is not in any way an indicator of indifference to the marvels of the language. The time I would usually allocate to blog-writing has, however,…
Mandarin is full of such interesting combinations of words into new words. The word for “thing” or “things”—dōngxi—is a combination of the words for “east” (dōng) and “west” (xī<…
In Pimsleur I learned two ways to say “Mandarin.” The main one was Pǔtōnghuà, which I have seen translated variously as “common speech,” “common tongue,” and “common language”—and which is, I have been…
Sonia Gil, my guide through Fluenz Mandarin’s interactive language-learning product, just taught me in lesson 39 that if I order water in China, I should ask for bīng shuĭ. Bīng means “ice,”…
As I go through my Fluenz lessons, over and over I have been getting the word for “one” wrong when I type it in pinyin. Not the letters—which are just y plus i, so…
I admit it: I have the language-learning adult version of senioritis. Just a little bit. It is growing harder to buckle down on Chinese and I am kind of daydreaming about what comes next. These Irish and Yiddish Books Have…
Today in a discussion of time in Beginner’s Chinese by Yong Ho (second edition), I read: When asked to visualize the movement of time from past to present and then to future, most American students would…
I have only a few days left for Mandarin, and I am trying to finish up several Chinese language-learning products by May 1, when I start Irish. It is not looking good for Fluenz, since I still have 19 lessons left of…
In honor of my last day of Chinese (for now), today I visited a Mandarin class for second-graders at P.S. 368, a public elementary school at Amsterdam and 146th Street in Harlem. Approaching P.S. 368 The class is part of…
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