Living Language Note: Over the next few months, our new friend Kathleen, aka Kat, will be taking a journey with us. She’ll be learning the challenging yet rewarding language of Chinese – and she’ll be blogging about it along the way! Check here every Monday for an update from Kat. When she’s not learning Chinese & blogging about it, Kat is a chef with Bon Appetit Management Company. She has her own blog and you can follow her on Twitter.
With book and CD in hand, this weekend I began lesson one of my Living Language Platinum Chinese. I must say trying to form some of these sounds is very hard!
Once the guide went over the vowel accents and what they represent, it helped me in trying to form the correct pronunciations. It is strange trying to pronounce a word that looking at it the pinyin would be pronounced entirely differently in English. That is definitely going to take time for me to get used to.
The letters like “c”, “r” and “q” are especially difficult. I literally cannot think what letter in English “c” and “q” would be closest to, and the “r” sounds like an “l”, which I imagine is why many Chinese native speakers have trouble with English words with an “l” in it.
One of the hardest words for me to pronounce has to be “not bad” or bùcùo. I think the way I would write it phonetically is “bwo-shho”. I think my favorite word has to be “thanks” or “Xièxie”. Sometimes I feel like I have cotton balls in my mouth as I try to pronounce these words!
I can already tell that learning Chinese is going to take some serious practice. I think I listened to each track of lesson one a minimum of three times each before moving onto the next section.
I look ahead to see what kinds of phrases I will be learning and I saw that there is an entire lesson about dining in restaurants (lesson seven) which I’m really looking forward to. After all, I am a chef!
After lesson one and realizing it’s going to be hard for me to really remember these phrases, I’m definitely not going to skip ahead just so I can learn some food phrases. I will be taking my CD in the car with me on my ride to and from work so I don’t forget how to pronounce these words.
I’m glad the book shows the characters for each word I’m learning, but I’m a bit intimidated to actually learn to write them. Maybe I’ll be braver in the week ahead to break the character book out, but I don’t want to overwhelm myself too early on.
More to report next week!
