Learning Mandarin

Good afternoon. In today's class we started our session with a review of Pinyin through a group competition. After that, we’ve started learning Unit 9. In the lesson, we focused on the text 《我的家My Family》 and learned the pronunciation and meanings of nine Chinese characters: 的、家、这、有、爷、奶、爸、妈、和. Following that, we practiced writing these characters together and did some word formation exercises using them. I explained the use of the comma and pause mark ( “、”顿号) in the text, as it might be a bit unfamiliar to students. Remember, the comma is often used to separate sentences with a slightly longer pause during reading, while the pause mark is used to list items, with a shorter pause. We also learned a sentence pattern "这是我的家" (This is my family). The structure is: Subject (pronoun) + "是" + Object. In our next class, we will expand on this sentence pattern and practice replacing words. For your homework, I encourage students to draw a family portrait or use photos t...

  Dear parents and students, Good afternoon. In today's class, we focused on the last four Chinese pinyin finals: ang, eng, ing, ong, and also covered the recognition of the sight word "ying." With this, we have completed the entire pinyin learning. In the upcoming classes, I plan to engage the students in reviewing and comprehensive exercises related to pinyin. Pinyin serves as a supportive tool for learning Chinese characters. When encountering unfamiliar characters, students can use pinyin for pronunciation, but once they are familiar with the pronunciation, I encourage them to transition to reading characters directly, avoiding the situation where they can only read pinyin but not the characters. After completing the pinyin exercises, we continued with the study of Unit 8 of Chinese textbook. We reviewed the sentence pattern "我去学校" (I go to school) with a structure of “subject + verb + object”. Through vocabulary substitution, we expanded exercises related t...

  Dear parents and students, Good afternoon. Today, we began by reciting characters from Unit 7 and all the Pinyin initial and finals we have learned so far and then focused on learning the pronunciation and writing of the finals "un," "ün," and the whole syllable "yun." Following the Pinyin exercises, we have started the first part of Uint8 in the Chinese textbook. Through the study of the text "我去学校" (I am going to school), students learned the pronunciation and meanings of 12 Chinese characters (开、了、真、高、兴、车、见、说、早、你、们、好). Then, we practiced writing these characters together and used them for word formation exercises. Previously, we had learned the pronunciation and meanings of 见 , 说 , 你, and 们 in earlier units. In this stage, I require students to also master the writing of these four characters. During post-class exercises in word formation or sentence construction, students need to pay attention to the usage of "们," which is used af...