Da jia hao! Cullen and I have made a new friend in town named Xiang Xiang. I managed to somehow invite her over for dinner last night, and Cullen frantically managed to prepare another masterpiece four course dinner while also teaching a class in the afternoon and juggle 30 students at English corner, while I struggled with our crazy washing machine (everything's in Chinese, so for all I know I could be cooking the clothes in there) and tried to figure out where in the heck Xiang Xiang was on campus so I could get her back to our apartment. Xiang Xiang, if you haven't already guessed, speaks no English, which is why I want her to become a permanent fixture in our lives - it motivates us to finally study some Chinese. I've been listening to Pimsleur over the past seven months, but the way that people regard my Chinese is the way I imagine we might regard Edmund Spencer if he were to suddenly rise from the dead and start speaking to us in ye olde English. And they don't speak the "very standard" (as they kindly put it) Chinese back to me, so I don't understand them anyway. I've discovered an awesome new learning tool - www.askbenny.cn. For anyone currently in China who doesn't have access to the amazing and talented Dana for lessons, try this site! I swear I am not being paid by the righteous, ingenious Benny to promote it. You know it's a current learning tool when one of the first things you learn is how to say "Starbucks" in Mandarin.
So, we've been watching askbenny videos and frequenting nciku.com, but it'll take us a while to be the Chinese - English dictionaries you all expect us to be! Hopefully Xiang Xiang won't tire of our pant-o-miming anytime soon, fluency is a ways off I'm afraid...
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3 comments:
Wonderful!! This is certainly the best way to become conversational in a new language, and this is a great opportunity to do that. Hope you can keep the relationship going and maybe expand on it. (I'm stifling the urge to comment about communicating with the barber.)
Yes, it's best to leave the barber out of the loop... The least of which being that he doesn't speak Mandarin...
am impressed that Starbucks is appropriatly revered, -this will be a highly relevant pursuit!- good luck (let us know when lil' debbies are used in a sentence)
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