Cantonese I Monday Night ALESN 2/25/19 Class Summary and Notes

Hi Gang,

This past Monday night, we covered new material that I didn't cover during the 2017-2018 academic year because I had to stop teaching last February because my work schedule had changed. Therefore, going forward, I will type your class all new weekly notes and blog entries, the extent of which will depend on how much free time I have during a given week. Let's see how much time I have today to summarize your lesson and provide any notes along the way...

Vocabulary-wise, without actually re-teaching the lesson here in this email/blog entry, let me point out the important observations I made during class pertaining to our new words:

1. First of all, though it appears that we have 43 new vocabulary words, we actually have only 34 new concepts, some of them using multiple possible pronunciations or uses of old or new vocabulary items. If you group this new information properly during your home study time, you will only need to memorize at most 34 new concepts, not 43. You can further group these new vocabulary items into a very limited number of CATEGORIES, as I will try my best to explain below.
2. Remember that 1 and 33 are the same word, same usage, but that 33 is with the initial "ng" sound and 1 is after dropping that sound due to "the ng phenomenon" that I have explained multiple times in class.
3. 2, 7, 16, 28, 29, 35, 36, and 37 are all numbers that you will need to eventually know, but it will make more sense after next Monday's class, when I will draw a chart of the numbers on the board: first zero, then 1 through 10, and then using the words for 1 to 10, we will construct the Cantonese terms for 11 through 99.
4. 4, 25, 26, 27, 38, and 39 are all sentence final particles that we will see in action in various places in the dialogue.
5. 5, 21, 34 and 41 are terms related to telling time in 15 minute intervals or on the half hour.
6. 8, 9, 10, 13, 19, and 24 are related to 3 different methods of telling time, which we discussed in class this past Monday. These 3 methods are the DAAHP6 + number 1 through 11 SYSTEM, letting us tell time in 5 minute increments (10 after the hour, 25 after the hour, etc.); the GO3 JIH6 SYSTEM (allowing us to do exactly the same thing as the DAAHP6 SYSTEM); and the FAN1 JUNG1 SYSTEM, allowing us to tell the exact time (9:17, etc.).
7. The rest of the vocabulary words are related in this lesson to the concept of telling time: watches running fast, slow, ready yet, not ready yet, this kind of stuff. PLEASE MEMORIZE THESE WORDS, AS THEY ARE VERY BASIC TO CANTONESE AND YOU WILL EVENTUALLY NEED TO KNOW ALL OF THESE ITEMS.

When I did the Conversation Build Up, we went through word at a time, phrases at a time, and then sentences at a time. *Remember that I pointed out that it appears that the 2 speakers' names have been reversed in the book as to who is actually speaking when addressing the other person. Ask me about this during next class if you are unsure what I mean; I don't feel like explaining it here.

We saw that our dialogue takes place in an office, where one guy has come to get the other guy for their lunch together. They ask if they are ready yet. They talk about what time it is. The one guy asks the other guy if his watch is fast or slow or accurate. They talk about the possibility that the one guy's watch is no longer accurate, but that he isn't sure (special sentence final particle to communicate doubt, as we discussed in class). The one guy asks the other guy to wait for him. Sure, no problem. Sorry. It's all right.

YOUR HOMEWORK: Please go back and reread the dialogue after reviewing the vocabulary and understanding how the vocabulary words fit into related categories as I have mentioned above. If you can, try to memorize the new vocabulary words while keeping in mind that they are related to each other in the ways that I have suggested. If you need to, or maybe just as a nice review of the sounds of spoken Cantonese, please listen to the mp3 that goes with this lesson.

We will pick up next time with the Recapitulation on page 85, answer any questions, and then you all will break up into "Happy Happy Groups" to run the dialogue with a partner or partners. Following this, we will review some pronunciation reminders on pages 86 through 88 and then mention some Culture notes on page 89. Finally, I will cover or begin to cover some grammar points ("Structure Notes") beginning on page 89. Before explaining these grammar points, I will draw a chart on the board, as suggested at the beginning of this email, and explain to you the beautiful and simple system that Cantonese uses to count things. We will learn the words for the numbers 0 through 10, and then using the Cantonese words for the numbers 1 through 10, we will learn how to construct the remaining numbers from 11 through 99.

Thanks again for attending class and see you all on Monday.