ALESN Mandarin I Class summary and notes from this past Monday's class -- sorry for the 4 day delay...

Hi Gang,

Sorry for the 4 day delay in sending this email -- just busy...

This past Monday was our first day back in 3 weeks, so we spent the beginning of class reviewing the previous dialogue and vocabulary. Then I picked up with the 4 grammar points on pages 29-32:

1. SHI4, the verb TO BE
2. Yes or no questions ending with MA
3. The negative adverb BU4 (and its possible tone change at times to BU2 when preceding 4 tone Mandarin verb, such as BU2 XING4 (to not have the last name of)
4. The adverb YE3 (also)

Following my explanation of these grammar points and after going over the examples, we broke up into small groups and you all had a chance to do the Language Practice exercises on pages 32-34. We also learned some vocabulary words for some new nationalities that had not been covered so far in class, to help us ask and tell each other where we are from.

We finished the class with an introduction to Lesson 2 Dialogue 1 about FAMILY MEMBERS. We saw that this conversation / discussion takes place while 2 friends are looking at a family photo of one of the guys. YOUR HOMEWORK IS TO WATCH THE DVD VIDEO FROM THE SAN FRANCISCO STATE WEBSITE FOR THIS DIALOGUE SEVERAL TIMES, UNTIL YOU COMPLETELY UNDERSTAND IT AND YOU FEEL THAT YOU ARE READY TO REALLY WORK THE DIALOGUE IN NEXT MONDAY'S CLASS.

We are going to review the vocabulary and dialogue, re-break everything down from the dialogue into its basic concepts and the literal word order as it translates into English, and then after repeating it a number of times, we are going to break into small groups and you will all have a chance to run the dialogue back and forth for 10 or 15 minutes. Following this, we will cover (or begin to cover) 4 important grammatical concepts on pages 45-48. YOU ARE ENCOURAGED TO PREVIEW THIS MATERIAL AS WELL, AS PART OF YOUR HOMEWORK WHILE PREPARING FOR NEXT MONDAY'S CLASS.

As I mentioned in your email from 3 weeks ago, I am not sure what happened, but apparently my 2017 blog entries skip Lesson 1 Dialogue 2. There appears to have been some kind of miscommunication last year wherein Jeremy, our Thursday night Mandarin 2 teacher, had subbed for me that week and he had accidentally skipped Lesson 1 Dialogue 2 in favor of jumping right into Lesson 2 Dialogue 1. Apparently, my shy class at the time didn't think to stop him and ask him to back up to the previous dialogue...and then for whatever reason, I never actually covered Lesson 1 Dialogue 2 in a proper 2017 blog entry -- though I apparently did cover it in class... 

 

Sorry!!!

Please review your recordings that you should have all made of last week's lesson, and please review the DVD videos for Lesson 1 Dialogue 2 and Lesson 2 Dialogue 1.

See everyone on Monday, when we will jump right into Lesson 2 Dialogue 1. Yay.

Best,

Brendan