Cantonese I 11/26/18 Monday Night Class Summary, Notes from last year's blog entries, INSIGHTS

Hi Gang,

Last night, we began with a review of the initial and final sounds of Cantonese -- the Lego building blocks of the language, as detailed on pages 11 and 12 of your book. Following this, we quickly covered the material on pages 12 through 24 -- or at least, I covered some of that material and then asked you all to read the remaining material on your own. PLEASE READ THESE PAGES THIS WEEK. Thanks!

Rather than re-invent the wheel, I am going to paste some links below to several very detailed 2017 blog entries covering all of the pronunciation and tones material that we have learned so far. Please read the following blog entries and watch any embedded video links, etc.:

http://www.sayitrightchinese.com/2017/10/cantonese-i-class-summary-insights-and_25.html

http://www.sayitrightchinese.com/2017/10/cantonese-i-monday-oct-30-2017-class.html

http://www.sayitrightchinese.com/2017/11/cantonese-i-class-summary-insights.html

AND FINALLY, we have only glossed over the dialogue from lesson 1 so far, and will be reviewing it, the lesson vocabulary, and some specific exercises pertaining to that material next Monday (I had wanted to cover this stuff last night but alas, we were locked out of our room until 6:21 pm). HERE is last year's entry on the vocabulary and dialogue of lesson 1, with a nice additional video link to the CantoCourse (Happy Jellyfish) Youtube channel created by my Hong Kong friend Cecilie Gamst Berg for learning Cantonese:

http://www.sayitrightchinese.com/2017/11/cantonese-i-class-summary-insights_18.html

Your homework for this week is to read and try your best to understand the material mentioned in these 4 2017 blog entries, and to review the textbook pages covered so far. If you have already purchased a DVD or downloaded a movie or bookmarked a Youtube video of a Disney movie or whatever in Cantonese, as I keep suggesting to you all, please start watching some of it in Cantonese with English subtitles. It is best to watch the movie all the way through several times over the coming weeks and then to take one scene at a time and play and replay that scene until you start getting a feel for THE SOUNDS, TONES, and SPOKEN CADENCE of Cantonese. I promise that this will help you as we go along this year -- and it will just make your learning experience more fun.

I was going to type some good insights at this point into my own personal learning process and learning history with Chinese (Cantonese and Mandarin), but I think I will save that for a separate, future blog entry, because I am pressed for time this morning and need to get back to my regular work.

Thanks very much for so many students taking my last email/blog entry so seriously and for stepping up your attendance to last night's class. It was good to see approximately twice as many students last night as the week before!

Best wishes to all and see everyone next Monday.

Brendan