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.
This week I have my confidence back! Lesson 5 of my Chinese Platinum was one where I actually kept up and felt myself improving! In this lesson I learned how to make possessive nouns and adjectives as well as a few new words like yīshēng (doctor) and zhàoxiàngjī (camera) and a lot of colors.
After this lesson I can now say that I have a blue hat or “Wŏ yŏu lán màozi.” Or that my pen is black – “Wŏ de lán shì hēI de.” Notice how there is a bunch of “de” added into that last sentence? That’s because “de” makes things possessive, so “wŏ de” is how you say my/mine, and the “de” at the end of the sentence goes with “hēI” because black is describing the pen.
Luckily for me this whole possessive “de” lesson was way less confusing than the lessons on numbers. Phew! The lessons are definitely trying to ramp up my learning of the Chinese characters, so I think I’m going to have to break down and open the character book soon. Wish me luck!
