User Comments - zazen
zazen
Posted on: Getting a Phone Number
September 11, 2008, 11:41 AMBesides learning the vocab and dialogue in this lesson, I found it to be quite good practice for distinguising tones. When you've got isolated words (the individual numbers) placed one after another, you can really pick out and differentiate the tones very easily.
Cheers Jenny and Ken.
P.S. John: Maybe something on transcendental numbers sometime :)
Posted on: The Third Tone
September 10, 2008, 02:42 PM"abused like a red-headed stepchild"
Yeah I noticed that too. But I guess the beauty of hosting a podcast from China is that political correctness can go out the window to make way for a bit of humour. (My British conditioning still finds it a bit jarring however).
Wo ai Zhongguo!
Posted on: The First Tone
September 08, 2008, 11:10 AMTruly great lesson. You talk about Chinese being an economical language - how about the economy of that podcast?? Education, inspiration and entertainment in less than 8 minutes!
Learning tones seems very similar to training your ear in music to distinguish the 'quality' and 'colour' that differentiates between major, minor, diminished and augmented... once it 'clicks' they each sound totally unique.
Posted on: Good Morning!
September 05, 2008, 04:53 AMBrilliant! Got me speaking Mandarin and signing up all in the space of 10 mins! Great job guys.
A quick question: Is it discouraged that people learn spoken Mandarin with the Pin yin to begin with and later add the Chinese characters to their vocab? Being a westerner they are so alien to me and are slightly daunting at this stage.
Xiexie
Posted on: The Fourth Tone
September 11, 2008, 02:21 PMMy observation is that the 4th tone sounds similar to the way you would say "ciao" in Italian. Very close to the way you pronounce the word jiao4. That's how I try to remember the 4th tone.
ciao!