User Comments - twowrights
twowrights
Posted on: Pearl Tea
May 15, 2008, 08:24 PMTO: mai9 The song is called "Breathe In" by Frou Frou from their "Details" album. Great song! Great album! Listen to it and a few others on Myspace while drinking your zhenzhu naicha and I guarantee it will taste even better: http://www.myspace.com/froufrou
Posted on: Hungry Traveler: Xinjiang
May 23, 2008, 07:27 PMKen, I think the dialog before the lesson is a good idea. It mimics real life. In real life you don't have a Chinese person say to you (in English), "Okay now, I'm going to begin speaking to you in Mandarin so get ready." No. Prepared or unprepared, they just speak. The dialog first is good training for us to try and figure out what is going on by ourselves. If you can't figure a word out, fine. You'll get it in the lesson. If you can manage to get even a little bit before the lesson then it's a major victory and it will spur you on more. As far as the Xinjiang accent goes, I think that if you want to be fluent in the Chinese language then one needs to also come to know and understand the Chinese culture. Xinjiang is in China therefore part of Chinese culture. Even if this accent is not "high frequency", it stills exposes us to the many different ways that Mandarin sounds in various regions of China. Surely this cannot hurt us in the learning process. Flexibility is essential when learning Mandarin. The way it is spoken in one area and not in another is neither right nor wrong. There is the "standard" Mandarin and many variations from there. That's my 2 cents.