ALESN Monday night Cantonese Class 12/3/18 -- Sorry for the extreme delay in typing this post...

Hi Gang,

I apologize for taking almost an entire week to post this. I am still recovering from this annoying cold and I had some unexpected stuff this past week.

Last Monday, we covered the drills from lesson 1 and finally finished that lesson. We also previewed lesson 2's vocabulary, putting us in a position to start "lesson 2 proper" tomorrow night.

First, we reviewed the vocabulary for lesson 1 on page 30. These are the most basic words that we will learn all year. Please memorize these 25 vocabulary items (including several common last names). Please refer to the mp3s that accompany the text from your downloads for pronunciation and tones, as well as any recordings that you have hopefully been making of your classes with me pronouncing everything and you guys repeating after me.

Following this, we reviewed lesson 1's dialogue, everyone repeating after me. From here, we went through a series of substitution drills, expansion drills, and one conversation drill on pages 26 through 29. Please review these drills sections, as these exact kinds of drills will be repeated in every lesson for the rest of your course.

Finally, we previewed the vocabulary for lesson 2 on pages 54 and 55. Though there are 31 vocabulary words for lesson 2, many are repeats and in quite a few cases, words contain stems or "roots" if you will, that will help to condense and consolidate this knowledge into far fewer main CONCEPTS that you need to memorize. I pointed out some of these, like the use of YAHN4 after the name of a place to make a noun term for someone coming from that place (America Person = "American"; China Person = "Chinese"; England Person = "English"; etc.). We will review all of this stuff tomorrow  night.

In the meantime, if you have time, please check out the following blog posts that I typed last year for the 2017-2018 ALESN school year, regarding the end of lesson 1 and the beginning of lesson 2:

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

http://www.sayitrightchinese.com/2017/11/cantonese-i-class-summary-insights_24.html

Please also PREVIEW the following 2017 blog entry, which discusses some of the key concepts that we will cover in lesson 2 over the next couple of weeks:

http://www.sayitrightchinese.com/2017/12/cantonese-i-class-summary-insights.html

See you all tomorrow night. Again, sorry for my delay in posting this entry.

Best,
Brendan