The girls practising speaking Mandarin on the telephone.
Clara asks "which country do you come from?" and then runs through a series of numbers. Erica is ordering food and drink. I laughed at the part where she says she hates vegetables. They are both doing very well with their Mandarin (Ethan too).
It sure is a difficult language. I am working with some harder sentence structures now in my lessons and it does my head in. It's not just learning the words, but trying to re-order the way the thoughts come into your mind so you can express yourself quickly enough. Often I say something and my tutor will respond "I know what you mean, but that was definitely a Western sentence". Ha! - meaning I put everything together in the way the words came into my head, but not the way they form for a Chinese person.
Here's an example:
Qiao shang du che du de lihai
Sorry no tones on there, don't know how to type those. Those words literally translate to..
Bridge on block vehicles blocked seriously.
The problem I have is that in my head I think "there is a bad traffic jam on the bridge". Then I have to try to re-order that and express it in Mandarin. I think I spend a lot of time in conversations staring into space trying to figure out how to get the words out correctly. I sometimes study before I go to a particular location to try to prepare for the sentences I might use. The other problem is sometimes if you say the words in the wrong order it changes the meaning, not to mention if you get the tones wrong!
Comments