两千汉字的目标! 2000 Chinese characters goal!

Ok, I am not a rote dictating vocabulary list kinda Chinese teacher…but there is some kinda buzz in ‘seeing’ your ‘Chinese character’ progress!!!!

hanzi

两千汉字的目标 (liǎng qiān hàn zì de mù biāo) ‘Two Thousand Character Goal!’

When you can recognize the most common 2000 Chinese characters, you can read about 97% of a newspaper!  That doesn’t mean you can understand it all, because you still have to learn the compound word variations that those 2000 (and 50,000 rarer characters!) can make.  But being able to recognize these 2000 characters when reading, makes looking up new compound words so much easier and faster…making reading Chinese websites, story books and literature much more enjoyable and satisfying.

A visual on the wall, that shows you ‘the bigger picture’ of your character learning, can be a great motivator!!! We got these posters of the first 1000, and second 1000 Chinese characters a couple years ago.  The kids can already recognize most of the first thousand from reading lots of Chinese story books over the years.  But they have been going through a new program from a different developmental perspective to the other reading programs they have done in the past.  Now we have a new dedicated learning space, we thought it was an ideal time to hang them up again and start circling those characters as they are consolidating them in their new program.

We purchased our posters from Mandarin Poster.  Cool for the Mandarin Nerd, or to give kids a little competitive edge 🙂  Why should our kids learn how to read Mandarin? Click on the link, there are a lot more reasons than just ‘reading Chinese’!

丢手巾 Hide the Handkerchief

hide-hanky2

Here is a version of the ‘Hide the Hanky’ song and game we played in class this week with the little kids.  Words are below.

丢手巾丢手巾,轻轻地放在,小朋友的后面,大家不要告诉他,快点快点捉住他,快点快点捉住他

diū shǒu jīn diū shǒu jīn , qīng qīng de fàng zài , xiǎo péng yǒu de hòu mian , dà jiā bù yào gào su tā , kuài diǎn kuài diǎn zhuō zhù tā , kuài diǎn kuài diǎn zhuō zhù tā

Drop the hanky, drop the hanky, lightly put the hanky behind a friend, everybody don’t tell him/her, quickly quickly catch him/her, quickly quickly catch him/her.

Chinese teachers wishing to get their students to explain how to play the game in Chinese could show this video:

The simplified script is :

不知道小朋友有没有玩过丢手巾?那是一种小朋友玩的游戏。游戏的方式很容易。只要几位小朋友围成一个圈。另一个小朋友拿着手巾放在他们后面。谁拿到手巾就要追回放手巾的那位小朋友。

hide-hanky

Fruit creations this week! Song and Story Time Wed 7th Dec 2016

Here are some ideas and some of the language we will need for our OLDER kids activity this week.  We will plan a similar activity for little kids soon!! We will be reading about pet dragons in our little class!

Students can make any face/ animal out of fruit like this caterpillar :

img_7113

The language they could type on this picture could go something like this…

我叫苹果奇异果毛毛虫   The pinyin needed to type these characters is :  wǒ jiào píng guǒ qí yì guǒ máo mao chóng,

Double check that the right characters have come up in the candidate list!   This kind of sentence we can type just states the fruit and the animal  ‘I am called apple kiwi caterpillar’.  So you could pick any fruit and any animal, or animal face to do this.

 

img_7114

The above picture has been made to look like a particular character, Elmo! So for this fruit face we could type something like this on our picture:

我叫西瓜黄瓜胡萝卜蓝莓艾摩 You would need to type the pinyin in as: wǒ jiào xī guā huáng guā hú luó bo lán méi ài mó

Careful to make sure the right characters come up!  If you have trouble seeing the strokes on the more complicated characters, copy them and make them bigger in a word program, so that you can make sure you have typed the right characters!!! This sentence uses the name of ‘ELMO’ in the sentence, which is 艾摩 ài mó in Mandarin.  There are several character pronounced ‘ai’ and ‘mo’.  So for example if you type this ‘mo’ by mistake 魔 this means ‘devil’, so you probably wouldn’t want to have this character in Elmo’s name!  So the whole sentence says ‘I am called Watermelon Cucumber Carrot Blueberry Elmo’.

So you can use any animal or any character.  The quickest way to find out character names in Chinese, is to look up their Wikipedia site in English, and then ask to read the page in Chinese.  I can show you this in class!

You can add speech bubbles in your picture so it looks like your animal / character is talking, like this:

我叫苹果尤达 (wǒ jiào píng guǒ yóu dá) 'I am called Apple Yoda'

我叫苹果尤达 (wǒ jiào píng guǒ yóu dá) ‘I am called Apple Yoda’

Do a few google fruit face ideas before you come to class, and bring the fruit you need to make it.  I will have some things available to use, but I might not have the particular fruit you need!  Don’t forget to download a photo writing app like the one we looked at in class last week before you come to class.  If you don’t, you can just take your picture before you eat it, and we can work out what you need to type in at home! See you in class!

我爱你 I love you – new UK band Transition song!

The new single ‘I love you’ from Taiwan based UK band ‘Transition’ is a cute song and will have you singing along happily! A cool song to introduce ‘the culture of gift giving in China…a great springboard to have students research more cultural differences in ‘gift giving’!  Learning cultural differences is really important and leads to an understanding of ones own culture too! Learning through such a cute song though will help with our Mandarin acquisition too! Lyrics are below, you will note the characters are ‘traditional’ on the subtitles, so I have added the ‘simplified’ version, and the ‘pinyin’ to help you sing along!

 

送你雨伞不是因为要与妳散
只是因为英国的天气真的很烂
我只想要找一个简单的办法
帮助妳保护妳美丽的长发
谁知道会有这种意思
学文化比语言还难
有些事情真的不够简单
所以到最后 只能直接对妳说
我爱妳 我爱妳
我相信 妳也爱我
我们两个会永远在一起
这是爱情
I Love You

知道鞋子对女人非常重要
所以送妳的那一双为何不要
要妳跑路真的不是我的计画
想要表达妳是我的 Cinderella
谁知道会有这种意思
学文化比语言还难
有些事情真的不够简单
所以到最后 只能直接对妳说
我爱妳 我爱妳
我相信 妳也爱我
我们两个会永远在一起
这是爱情
I Love You

我们两个会永远在一起
这是爱情
I Love You
我爱妳 我爱妳
我爱妳 我爱妳
我爱妳 我爱妳
我爱妳 我爱妳
我爱妳

Pinyin:

Sòng nǐ yǔsǎn bùshì yīnwèi yào yǔ nǐ sàn
zhǐshì yīnwèi yīngguó de tiānqì zhēn de hěn làn
wǒ zhǐ xiǎng yào zhǎo yīgè jiǎndān de bànfǎ
bāngzhù nǐ bǎohù nǐ měilì de cháng fā
shuí zhīdào huì yǒu zhè zhǒng yìsi
xué wénhuà bǐ yǔyán hái nán
yǒuxiē shìqíng zhēn de bùgòu jiǎndān
suǒyǐ dào zuìhòu zhǐ néng zhíjiē duì nǐ shuō
wǒ ài nǐ

wǒ ài nǐ
wǒ xiāngxìn nǐ yě ài wǒ
wǒmen liǎng gè huì yǒngyuǎn zài yīqǐ
zhè shì àiqíng
I Love You

zhīdào xiézi duì nǚrén fēicháng zhòngyào
suǒyǐ sòng nǐ dì nà yīshuāng wèihé bùyào
yào nǎi pǎo lù zhēn de bùshì wǒ de jì huà
xiǎng yào biǎodá nǐ shì wǒ de Cinderella
shuí zhīdào huì yǒu zhè zhǒng yìsi
xué wénhuà bǐ yǔyán hái nán
yǒuxiē shìqíng zhēn de bùgòu jiǎndān
suǒyǐ dào zuìhòu zhǐ néng zhíjiē duì nǐ shuō
wǒ ài nǐ wǒ ài nǐ
wǒ xiāngxìn nǐ yě ài wǒ
wǒmen liǎng gè huì yǒngyuǎn zài yīqǐ
zhè shì àiqíng
I Love You

wǒmen liǎng gè huì yǒngyuǎn zài yīqǐ
zhè shì àiqíng
I Love You
wǒ ài nǐ wǒ ài nǐ
wǒ ài nǐ wǒ ài nǐ
wǒ ài nǐ wǒ ài nǐ
wǒ ài nǐ wǒ ài nǐ