h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Hey guys,

This is your friendly HoD speaking.

To your right you will find the emergency exits -

Sorry, wrong tape. I'm not going for the air hostess outlook...




Ok, back to the subject at hand. I've been teaching you some of the VERY basics of mandarin so far, but I sorta need to know what people want me to teach them.

So, these are the topics I can do (in the order I learnt them... I think):

-Getting to know you (I'm sorta doing this one now, and I'll probably finish it before going to another)
-Families and other relationships
-Animals
-In the classroom
-Days
-Time (actually, I think we learnt that earlier but it wasn't in my exercise book and I don't know what order we went through the text book)
-Birthdays
-Transport

I'm still doing transport now, but aside from that... yeah...

So, go ahead, pick!
Cat

In the classroom! Why was I enthusiastic about that? We just did that in German, I think I need to revise my German classroom stuff though, I didn't learn it very well, and I want to be able to do German well. Speaking of which, I should join the German thing here...

If we do in the classroom I'm going to be relying on my textbook SOO much, I was away for a lot of that unit and so had to learn heaps of it in one go. I can still remember our big story about the three men standing outside a house that has to do with one of the characters...

Oh... well.... if you don't want to, you don't have to... What are you best at? Whatever that is, lets do that.

I don't mind, I'll teach whatever people want to learn

Hooray! Now, teach!

ok, I'm going to put everything that's in the first few pages of my exercise book in here. It might repeat some stuff that's already in here...

Columns go enlish - pinyin - my version of pronunciation

Classmate - tongxue -tong shway
Father - baba - baa baa
Mother - mama - maa maa
goodbye - Zaijian - zai tea ann
thankyou - xiexie - C A C A
please come in - qing jin - ting jin (or gin as in gin and tonic)

You - ni - nee (or knee)
also - ye - yeah
Good or well - hao - how
Quite Well - hai ke yi - hi kare (like care with a 'k' sound) ye (as in yeast)

Ok, before I say the next to, i should say that in chinese instead of phrasing things so that they sound like a question, they put in question particles. So if there's a question particle it means it's a question)

Question particle (general) - ma - maa
Question particle (how about) - ne - nee (or knee)

Very - hen - hen but with the sorta lowered and softened. (does this make sense?) so instead of saying hen normally you sorta drop your throat...
Quite - ting - ting

OK, adding in another column now cause these are phrases. Columns now go pinyin - my pronunciation - literal english translation - proper english translation.

Ni hao ma - nee how maa - you well question particle? - How are you?
Ni zen mey ang? - nee zen may ung - how are things with you? (I don't know a literal word-for-word translation for this one, I haven't used it since year 7)

Eg of a convo:

Ni hao ma - how are you?
Wo hen hao - I very well
Ni ne? - How about you?
Wo hen hao - I very well


Cat

Umm... why did you say all that in hear instead of where you actually teach?

Bugger...

B*gger...

Hee hee. That's ok honey, we all understand, people make mistakes.

So, now that we have some members (who I hope are subscribed to all threads), what do you want to learn about?

Cat

I want to learn how to speak Mandarin!

Useful stuff- like sentence structure, verbs and conjugation, key phrases and nouns...

Well, see, in mandarin you don't learn verbs and nouns and stuff... I could sit here and go 'to ride' but you wouldn't understand when to use it cause it's a bit complex... I can do units though and in that you learn the verbs and nouns appropriate... And what to say and stuf...

We can do family, transport, animals, weather... I might finish off greetings when I next get time and then do some basic family stuff, you don't REALLY need to know what to call your grandmother on your fathers side as opposed to on your mothers, but we can go through that if you'd like.

Cat

And sentence structure differs... Usually you just start with the biggest and work your way down. So I say I live in Australia, Melbourne or it is 2004, December 18... But that only works when we're talking about that kind of stuff... Am I making much sense?

Cat

Not exactly what I meant...

Is it like English, where you have a subject, a verb, and a predicate? Or is it like Spanish, where the verb and the subject can sometimes be combined? Or does the subject come after the verb? Or...

well, see, that's the thing... it changes depending on what you're talking about, and besides which, I only know it in a few topics. We don't learn the order in Chinese like we did in French. You don't have endings and as far as I know you don't sit there going right, I need a verb, right I need a subject etc... You need measure words when you're talking about a number of things, for instance I don't just 4 cats, I have to say 4 measure-word cat. But the way I've been learning for instance when we did transport you learnt the nouns and then you learnt what verbs could be used with them and the sentence structure is pretty much the same as in english... I ride bus, for instance...

I don't think what i'm trying to say here is getting across...

/me steps in to either clear things up or confuse the heck out of people

As far as I understand, in Chinese there are words for verbs, words for nouns, words for prepositions, etc, generally, one uses Subject-Verb-Object word order, and past or future tense is established through adverbs.

example:

Wo er dian qu xuexao.

I at 2 go to school.

Subject - I Wo
[Time/Adverb] - [2 o'clock er dian]
verb - go to qu
object - school xuexao


that's actually more around te time school ends, but...

That would probably be better translated 'I 2 o'clock go school' and in proper English would mean 'At 2 o'clock I go to school'


Cat