ALESN Mandarin I class summary and notes for Monday, Feb 4, 2019 class

Hi Gang,

This past Monday night, we quickly reviewed and answered some questions about Lesson 2 Dialogue 1 and vocabulary, then we spent a good portion of the class breaking up into groups and going the Language Practice exercises on pages 48-49, using the material from the text as well as either real or fake family photos. As I went around the room, everyone seemed to do pretty well with the material, either performing it well or at least asking informed, smart questions. Thanks for that!

Following this, we previewed the vocabulary on pages 51-52 and then we had Santiago's lovely girlfriend from Taiwan -- I believe her name is Chien Chien? -- recite for us our brand new Lesson 2 Dialogue 2 on pages 50-51 (page 51 for the pinyin version).

What a treat to have a native speaker in class and to hear her recite the new dialogue -- even if at the very end of class! Many thanks to Santiago for bringing his girlfriend to class as our special guest. I welcome anyone else who has a friend or significant other to feel free to email me and arrange a visit. We love to have guests who can read our vocabulary and dialogues, and who can answer language or cultural questions -- like when Chien Chien answered student Jean's question about how to say stepfather, stepmother, stepbrother and stepsister in Mandarin. Very cool stuff!

We also learned from Chien Chien that Taiwanese people often pronounce the character for the new vocabulary word that we just learned, HE2 ("and" for 2 or more nouns) as HAN1. This was new to me, and I love learning new things!

Please refer to the following 2018 blog entries covering lesson 2 Dialogue 2 and its related vocabulary:

http://www.sayitrightchinese.com/2017/12/mandarin-i-alesn-thursday-dec-21-2017.html

http://www.sayitrightchinese.com/2018/01/mandarin-i-alesn-thursday-january-11.html

I taught this class on Thursdays during the 2017-2018 academic year. You can see that because of the insane number of Monday school closings so far this year,  we are around 1 month behind where I was at this time last year. Very sorry for that! That is what happens when we miss 4 classes due to various school closings, not including Winter Break...

We will review the new vocabulary and then explore the new dialogue next Monday, spending most of next class going over the dialogue and then breaking up into small groups to give everyone a change to run the dialogue back and forth. We will also hopefully begin the grammar points for this dialogue, depending on how long it takes us to make it through Dialogue 2.

YOUR HOMEWORK IS TO WATCH THE DVD VIDEO SEGMENT FROM EITHER THE SAN FRANCISCO STATE OR THE RHODE ISLAND UNIVERSITY WEBSITE, SENT TO YOU LAST YEAR.

Please come to class on Monday with a good basic understanding of the dialogue, having watched it several times in the scene from the DVD.

See you all on Monday,

Brendan