My Blog

13 JANUARY 2006
I’ll be starting MANDARIN classes on 18 Jan 2006

"WHAT? learning mandarin?
I thought you hated mandarin and even stormed out of
your mandarin classes and gave your mandarin teacher a
earful of @#$%&*, or even skipped them when you were in
lower secondary!"
That’s what most people would say

hahaha.. .eating my words now..
it’s a beginners’ course, level one
conducted by the Extended learning ctr in UTAR, sect 13 PJ
**Wink! Wink!**
PETALING JAYA…. PETALING JAYA…
catered for people with no fundamentals of this
language, learning from the very beginning…
hahaha…
I could jolly well be top of the class then ;P
So cocky, huh?
Well, i could hold a "semi-decent" conversation in
mandarin and read & write some "semi-decent" sentences
plus sms-es ( not INDECENT, mind you! ;P hahah)
WHAT WERE YOU THINKING?

So, if the people there do not have any basics in it,
I could…
Oh! that’s good for my ego
NO lah.. just kidding.
I’m serious in picking up the language so that i could
hold ‘decent’ conversation with mandarin-speaking
people
instead of the usual "rojak" vocabulary that i use.

True, my mandarin has improved by leaps and bounds
since my lower secondary school days, but there’s
still lots of room for improvement.
Ahem… being
modest, huh?
So, it’s back to school every wednesday evening now,
from 7 -9 pm,
let’s hope i learn something decent there ;-P

Wish me luck! (so that i could top my class);) haha…

My Mandarin class commenced yesterday at UTAR campus for Lifelong Learning.
Conversational Mandarin for beginners.
It was not what I’ve expected. There were lots of ‘banana’ like me there- yellow on the outside, white on the inside
Yeah, you’re right, Chinese but are not fluent or do not know any Mandarin.
And a couple of Indians and Malays.
Varying from early twenties to retirees. Good mixture, I think.

I got myself a place right in front kiasu? No lah…
So that I won’t fall asleep during lesson ( I am just like my JMC students: easily distracted and would start dreaming if I was sitting far away from the teacher)

A young girl sat next to me, in her early / mid-twenties.
We smiled, but didn’t talk.
I broke the ice after noticing that we’re wearing the same shoes from Vincci, albeit a different colour
“Hey, we’re wearing the same shoes!”
and that started a conversation.
Joanne was her name, she came with her dad and bro.
Oh, a family affair! Where was her mom?
She said her mom knows Mandarin.
I see…
So, you’re working in IBM?
Yeah. What about you?
and blah blah blah…

Teacher came in at 7.05pm
Introduced himself as Mr Chin.
The bespectacled nerdy type

Spent the whole evening learning about how to roll our tongues, keeping our tongues flat,
pronounce a syllable with breath coming out from the sides of our lips, etc. Saliva flying all over… Hahaha… I thought I was in a speech therapy class Not bad, I learned something good.
the four tones were like singing solfege in Yamaha
Thank God for my sense of pitch If not, ‘ban’ would have the same sound as ‘bang’
Then, someone said, “bangsai” (in hokkien, which I think could be loosely translated as “to defecate”)
Hualamak!
Everyone started laughing ;P
teacher said, it’s not ‘bangsai’ but the same pronunciation as the “bang” in that Hokkien word

A break in-between with coffee and tea provided, self-service.
I daren’t touch instant coffee anymore, after some bad experiences with Nescafe which set my heart throbbing fast, palpitations, head spinning, feeling hot and nauseous…
So I just had plain water. Ah, healthy drink
Lesson continued with all the “shi bu shi” (yes or no)
“kan yi kan” (have a look), etc
Class dismissed at 9.15pm
We’ll be continuing with this next week, we were told.

Okie, so it’s not as easy as I thought, esp. the hanyu pinyin thingie.
This is only the beginning, only conversational, to cater for people without any fundamentals in Mandarin.
So where do I stand with my “semi-decent” mandarin? Good to learn from the basics After all, I’m learning new things during lesson, right?
Reading and writing Chinese characters will only be introduced in Level 3.
Looking forward to the second lesson.

Rewarded myself for being a good girl and not falling asleep during class with KFC with Anakin