A day in my life - My Thursdays

On Thursdays I have my second 'Government and Politics of China' lecture of the week from 13:00-14:00 at the Harvard Hall room 201.

Thereafter I head off to my second Mandarin lesson of the week at 15:00-16:30 at the Chinese Institute of Language and Arts. I spend my Wednesday nights and Thursday morning preparing for my test. The reading and writing is extremely difficult. You have to memorise a character for every word and the character is made up of many intricate strokes. The speaking is also difficult. The language is made up of 4 tones so depending on which tone you use, it means something completely different!

Some interesting things that I've learnt about Mandarin:
- In Mandarin there are no plurals and they don't use he/she - there is just one word 'Ta' (using the first tone which is flat) for both sexes
- They don't have past and future tense verbs only the current tense verb like 'run'.
- The grammar is completely different to English. For example: We would say 'Would you like anything else?'. In Mandarin, the direct translation is 'Also want other yes/no?'
- Pingyin is the is the official system to transcribe Chinese characters into Latin script in the People's Republic of China, Republic of China (Taiwan), and Singapore. It is often used to teach Standard Chinese and spell Chinese names in foreign publications and may be used as an input method to enter Chinese characters (汉字 / 漢字, hànzì ) into computers. Source: Wikipedia
- There is software to write Chinese characters in MS word which uses Pingyin then you can select the appropriate character
- With regards to the writing, there is the Traditional Chinese writing with more complicated strokes and the Simplified Chinese Writing which is simpler. The simplified writing is used more today
- There is no alphabet for the writing. Each word is made up of different strokes which originated from the actual picture of the object but you really do have to use your imagination! :)
- There are 9 common strokes used in Chinese writing, just used in different places in the character
- The general rule is to write a character starting top to bottom, left to right
- They use 'punctuation' like in English. You can put a question mark, exclamation mark, comma or fullstop