Chinese for the Classroom

For those who are studying in classrooms or with a tutor, here's some vocabulary that you might find useful (on my teacher's site). As is often the case, I've made flashcards out of this for those of you who, like me, suffer from bad memory.

As well as suffering from a bad memory, I suffer from a lack of opportunity to use chinese. This means that very often, during classes, I (and my classmates) are slow to speak. What I really like about this particular vocabulary is that it allows us to stay in Chinese for longer, without resorting to English at the first hurdle. While this might not seem very important, but the impact is tremendous. Staying "in charactor" as one of my classmates buts it, makes Chinese seem much less like a thing to be studied and more like a language to be spoken.

Some more flashcards...

I've created a single flashcard file that I intend to expand a lot. I'm transferring the vocabulary (and eventually sentences) from the notes I've taken during the last term of lessons here in Cork. I won't blog every time I update it (that would be too noisy) but feel free to download it regularly to pick up any changes.

As ever, my flashcard files can be found here.

Cork Chinese Learners: This weeks flashcards

For my fellow Cork Chinese students in particular, but for anyone else who may be interested:

I've made flashcards from Liping's lesson number 9. They can be found here along with any other flashcards. This time I've realised that there was no need to enter the cards twice (doh!) and it's simply a matter of selecting the last of 4 'side modes', under the advanced menu, when starting a lesson.

Flashcards Continued: Some more

Taking a leaf out of John's book, and based on the lessons from my local teacher here in Cork, I've put together some flashcards using the jMemorize tool. This is just a first attempt (and only covers 3 out of the 8 lessons that Xiong Liping has prepared for us). The categories are a bit misleading, as the names of the lessons don't always coincide with the word-building section from which they are derived.

Again taking my lead from John, for each word I made two cards - one the reverse of the other. I wish the tool would make this easier by including a copy-and-reverse option.

My cards show simplified Chinese characters with toned pinyin on one side, and English translations on the other. If you download them, please let me know if I screwed up somewhere!

Flashcards: Thanks for the Memories

At the age of 37 (to steal that famous line from Marianne Faithful's Ballad of Lucy Jordan) my memory is sadly in tatters. I think it has been for some time. So one of the biggest problems I'm having with Chinese at the moment is absorbing new vocabulary.

I've taken to playing chinesepod podcasts, and my own local teacher's mp3 files in the car over and over, based on the old proverb that if you through enough mud against the wall, some of it is bound to stick. But thanks to John's Flashcards I now have another facility to deal with my fizzled out synapses.

John - thanks for your work on this. So far I'm finding it a really useful resource - so much so that I'm considering writing some flashcards for my fellow students here in Cork, based on the content of our course so far.