Some Like the Mother, Others Like the..

When studying Japanese, the importance of practising pronounciation was next to insignificant compared to how important it is now, when studying Chinese.

Every Wednesday we have classes at the language lab on campus.

It can be pretty nerve wracking.

Each and every one sit in their own lil' stall with a pair of headphones on, that has a mouthpiece attached to it. Step 1 is when the teacher, sitting with his own pair of headphones on in front of a computer, records a couple of fairly long dialogues, having us repeat it line by line after him. When he's finished recording we all start practising individually, being able to listen to the same recording, by pushing buttons on this machine thing everyone have on their desks.

Are you still with me? I know this is very exciting.

Cause it doesn't end there!


So you're sitting there, right, repeating the second dialogue for the fifth time - you're getting pretty tired, probably even jawning a bit. Do you have any idea how tiring it is to speak Chinese??

Lotte

Since I have the attention spand of a four-year-old and I'm sitting in front of the window facing the outside world, I soon start to pay more attention to that, than the textbook infront of me.

Mind you, I still have an awe-inspiring (if I might say so myself, after all, I love honking my own horn) ability to continue to repeat the lines of the dialogue with over-exaggerated gusto, usually cut-off by a occational heavy sigh, or a giggle, caused by the sound of a faraway airplane caught on the recording, being audible in the background every time Xiao Gao is asking Xiao Bai "what day the September 12th is", just so that he can declare that that day, as a matter of fact, is his birthday.

Whoa, long sentence.


But THEN, right when you think you're safe in your own little world, ehr, stall, practising with your headphones on and everything, suddenly the familiar sound of the teacher's voice saying the lines that you've been repeating for the past 15 minutes it cut-off by the teacher addressing you personally, asking you to repeat a word or a line until he's satisfied with the pronounciation.

The sudden shock, makes you of course take off your headphones, somehow expecting to find the teacher looking over your shoulder - but in fact he is sitting in front of his computer at the other side of the class room, being able to listen in on each and every one individually while we are practising.

It might not sound so horrible. But the fact that the teacher might be listening to what I'm saying into the mouthpiece, and that I don't know when, makes me pretty paranoid, I tell ya.

So now, every Wednesday, I sit there with my headphones on, gripping them so tightly my knuckles turn white, sweating, while saying the lines, anticipating the voice of the teacher suddenly correcting me any minute.


Luckily I love my teacher.

He is so cute!

He's from Beijing and lives in Norway together with his Japanese wife and two kids. He's only studied Norwegian for a very short time, but the first time I heard him speak, I thought he was Norwegian.

During class sometimes there's funny misunderstandings. The other day he was showing us a video on youtube from the celebration of the national day in China, and he was comparing a length of a certain street in Beijing with the distance from Oslo to Drammen, and I, being the master of off-tracking, asked him if he had ever been to Drammen before. He enthusiastically answered that he'd only been to the military for one month. Aww, he's so cute, and even though all the Norwegian students heard my question and his unmatching reply, no one had the heart to say anything.

So then we started a conversation about the military in China.


Anyway,

I present to you, a couple of random Asian chicks:



Moving on.


So..

The hoodie on my new sweater is pretty handy!


Instead of signalizing that I consider a conversation to be over by plugging my ears with my index fingers, like I usually do, I now...


Tada!

Now, if that doesn't give you a clue that our conversation is over, something is severly wrong with your EQ.


Unedited photo:


Turn & Crop:


Make me look even more intimidating:


Yeah, yeah, yeah!

Speaking of intimidating.

I got to intimidate Vidar's dad the other day:



Poor thing.

He's so adorable!

Lars

Fancy Indian food

Vidar

Father and offspring

And now, something totally random!

Today I tasted the cherry tomatoes abandoned right outside work.

It was like eating candy!

And my mom fed me:

(*freeloading*)


It's pretty mean to take pictures of people while they are eating.



...



Mwaha.


(Does anyone even read this shit?)

Studying Chinese

Yep, yep. Same hardship - another language.

I've survived the first two weeks of studying Chinese.

We have classes five days a week, and at this point we're still pretty much at the "Hi, my name is"-stage.

The first week we spent learning pinyin, which currently is the most used romanization system for Standard Mandarin. In other words: how to read and write Chinese in Roman characthers.

I still think it's pretty difficult, since many of the syllables are really hard to distinguish. They sound so alike! The teachers keep testing us by having small dictations, and hopefully with some time it'll come around.



Learning Chinese characters

I most definitely got a somewhat advantage from my two years of studying Japanese, considering I've already got the practise of memorizing almost 600 traditional Chinese characters.

But when learning Japanese you simply get told to memorize the character, without really knowing much about why the character looks the way it looks. I think, as a result of this, very few of the characters (only the ones you use most frequently) tend to stick.

As you might know, when writing in Japanese you're using a combination of three different scripts: Chinese characters (漢字), and two syllabic scripts made up of modified Chinese characters, hiragana (ひらがな) and katakana (カタカナ). The hiragana and katakana scripts consist of around 46 characters each, and 1945 Chinese characters are frequently beging used in written Japanese.

So, a sentence in Japanese can look like this:

私の名前はキーネです。(Watashi no namae wa Kine desu - My name is Kine)

The words for "I" and "name", "watashi" (私) and "namae" (名前) are written in Chinese characters. The grammatical particles "no" (の) and "wa" (は) are written in hiragana, and my name is written in katakana (キーネ - Kiine).

I'm a little off track. Let's move on.


Now, when studying Chinese, they actually explain more about how the characters are constructed, and hopefully it'll make it a bit easier not only memorize them, but also remember them. Maybe, I don't know.

This semester we'll learn around 500 Chinese characters. While the Chinese characters used when writing Japanese, they're all traditional Chinese characters, while in Chinese, they now use simplified ones. We're supposed to choose whether we want to write traditional characters or simplified ones, and we have to stick to either one, but we need to be able to read both. (example: 話 vs. 话)

Makes sense?

I think I'll memorize the simplified ones, since they are the ones used in our textbook and the ones the teachers write on the blackboard.

Chinese tones

Mandarin Chinese uses five tones, and boy, are we still struggling.

Japanese language hardly distinguish between tones, meaning that you can pretty much pronounce something however you want (within reason), and they'll still be able to understand you (if they want to, that is)

すみません，お名前は何ですか。
Sumimasen, onamae wa nan desu ka?
Excuse me, what is your name?

While in Chinese, a correct pronounciation is crucial

请问，你叫什么名字?
Qǐngwèn, nǐ jiào shénme míngzì?
May I ask, what is your name?

If you screw up on the tones, you're most likely to say something completely different than what you intended to.

I bet we'll cause a lot of amusement to our Chinese teachers and speaking partners in the future.


I too have a pretty hard time learning the tones. I feel I have a somewhat advantage from studying Thai, with its five tones. The problem is that the tone marks used in Chinese and Thai are similar, but the pronounciation is different: a word in Chinese with the tone mark ` will be pronounced with a different tone than a Thai word with the same tone mark.

Makes sense?

So, I still tend to mix up, sometime reading a word in Chinese with a Thai tone.

But I'll get there.

Lotte

Long glances at the kids
who has just started to study Japanese
*nostalgia*

Chinese vocabulary

Boy, boy, boy. It was very difficult at times to memorize vocabulary in Japanese, just because it's so different from any of the other languages I've learned. Words like "kawaii" (cute) and "kowai" seem almost alike, and it took a long while in the beginning not to mix them up. (Aww, your baby is so kowai, ehr, I mean kawaii)

My hope is that Chinese vocabulary will be a bit easier to memorize, and get to stick, because of the tones, and that I can draw my own parallells between Japanese and Thai vocabulary that I already know, even though they might not really have anything in common. (Example: the Chinese word for "to be", shì (是) and the Thai word for "to be" chı (ใช่))

I'm so hot

Translating from pinyin into Chinese characters

I'm still very excited about studying Chinese, even though I very much expect a bumpy road for the first months/year - until I find my "strategy" on how to study this language the best way.

Hopefully I will get an interest for things like Chinese music, movies, etc., and in that way get a lot of language input "for free", compared to Japanese, where I had no interest in the popular culture at all. Academically I did exceptionally well, because I'm a diciplined student, but in the long haul, when studying a language, it isn't enough to just know the curriculum and nothing else.

If there was any doubt

Benedicte is very excited about studying Chinese

Dialogue about complaining about the weather
- that'll come in handy for us
Norwegians
Seeing as that's what we do
best

Anyway.

Hopefully next year I'll get to go to China!

High five! *voice of Borat*

Reunion

Yesterday I had my first Chinese class, and I'm excited!


Anyway, moving on

In the afternoon yesterday a big bunch of new and old Japanese studying students gathered for a small reunion at campus.

Lorenzo

Petter
Avoiding getting a
sunburn
Obviously

Asaki

Heidi & Lotte

Lilly

Ingrid

After all
It was a 'Japanese' reunion

Where's Cecilie?

Then, a bunch of people from my awesome buddy group joined, and we had some good ol' fun playing in the grass.

Oops, wrong focus

There ya go