okay so some of you asked me to do a video about learning Chinese the process of learning the
Chinese language let me show you one of my books this is the book for my writing class basically
it's let me like I said it's a writing class so what you've got here is just sentences like it
tells you the pinyin and you write the things and gives you new characters their meanings that kind
of stuff and then eventually you know you learn to put them together you know it's a you know
into stuff that actually has meaning and as it goes on you have things like this where you've
got kind of a word bank and you have to choose which ones are right and that kind of stuff so
yeah I mean I mean there's not much to the class that I'm really learning some of the most stuffing
is my comprehensive Chinese class and that's just kind of a combination of reading and speaking not
really writing anymore here's the book that I'm using right now it's called a new Chinese course
we had another one but I actually finished finished that book and it's got toppings like
that this is like I think I thought this means I thought the movie wasn't bad and it's got the
dialogues right here me and my teacher read these dialogues right here and this particular one is
is about is about movies look just like I said expressing opinions about movies and new words
right here it's got the characters it's got the part of speech like don't - the verb means of
noun stuff like that so yeah it's got all of these right here and then it's got different
phrases and substitutions you can use stuff like that to help you better understand the concept
and yeah that's basically I'm doing right now we had another book they don't that opinion and
opinion is this right here it's the romanization of the character the pronunciation and they had
all the pinyin in the character but I finished that it was a little too easy and so yeah that's
cause I'm learning some of the most stuff in my teachers got a really good idea she's you can
tell she's a really experienced teacher and she knows where I'm at you know as far as what my
language level is and she's really got a good feel on how to teach a foreign language even
though this is the first time she's ever taught Chinese doing anybody so props to her props to
her my next class and one of my harder classes is my Chinese culture class this class we use
this book right here the ins and outs of Chinese culture and it's in French and English and in
Chinese it's uh it's mostly in Chinese but when you have like the word back like the new words
it's got explanations in French and English so sometimes it's nice like sometimes I can guess
what the French means and it actually helps me understand better if the English translation is
not very good but I'm basically what it is is the book is all all in the Chinese characters
and have to go in I have to translate all of these and I have to you know understand you
know what it means like what the grammar is and the grammar I'm really having a hard time with
because grammar was never my you know strong point and I actually have to go back like on
the internet and look up you know what parts of speech you know actually do what you know like
what a preposition does and what up adverb is and things like so it's a little pathetic but
you know I learned a lot you know from this I'm learning a lot of stuff about the Chinese
grammar I mean in like all the other books it's got new words hard words and then some of them
it's got like the proper nouns like right here Yidali - italy. Jiangsu, Zhejiang Province...you
know things like that in this guy references to books like Marco Polo and stuff he wrote
things like that and there's a lot of there's a lot of you know cool stuff beijing famous food
tea leaves tea culture marriage customs and all kinds of stuff so it's a really good good tool
for me to use to learn you know learn all about Chinese people my last class that i
have is my chinese listening class and that's actually well it used to be my hardest but now
it may be my chinese culture class but i don't know it's still it's still hard -- what happens
basically in this class we use this book right here and we basically we have you know common
sentences you know things that are said all the time and we have new words of course and notes
about grammar and proper nouns and things like that you know names of places and things like
that that's what I mean by proper nouns and the book came with a CD and I listened to the things
that are on the CD and it's got exercises like it'll be a conversation for example somebody's
at a restaurant trying to order food asking the waiter to bring I don't know bring some beer or
things like that or to you know I want three hot dishes two cold dishes I want though Beijing roast
duck one of the most famous foods in China and you know things like that and I listen to that
and you know what I get a good understanding of it and in class we list them again and I answer
questions about the recordings and it's really I think it's really hard like you have to listen
like here's that where the answers go I have to listen and understand the question and the
recording and I choose the answer and that's all there is to it so as far as like you know
hardcore I don't know as far as like homework and things like that it's really pretty light
on a homework but because the little homework that I do have to do is in a different language
just makes it really hard it's a good process it's a difficult process it's very long but you
know overall I really enjoy it you know when when I can finally translate something and on the first
try.. like - oh I got it! you know that's just a great feeling you know when I don't just sit
there for you know 30 minutes to to look up stuff in the dictionary okay let me show you I'll use
my Chinese culture book as an example how long it will take me to you know look up one word
that I don't know okay so I got my book there's definitely gonna be a character in here that I
don't know so let me just read real quick and find one okay okay I found one it's this one right here
well I don't know if you can see that anyway I'm gonna look it up and what the first thing that you
have to do is you have to feed your dictionary and they have what's called a radical. Now, Chinese
radicals or components of Chinese characters and you have to look them up based on the number of
strokes and things like that so that's what I'm going to do just watch see how long this
takes for one character okay so the radical is four strokes. the radical ... the radicals are
different for every character so and they're in different places so you just kind of have to guess
which one that's a radical okay number 96 which is under 96 there will be all all of the characters
in here will have the same radical okay I found the character it's on page 11 95 and I have to
look it up and one thing about Chinese characters is that almost all characters have different parts
of speech testing like when one character could be a could be a noun and a verb an adjective
the preposition so you have to guess based on context which one is okay character is youjiu,
which is the compound word so that can mean "long time honored long-standing or age old" so
hey there you go so now we have the words LiShi YouJiu, which means long-standing time-honored
history so that's looking up one character each character takes about a minute or sometimes just
a hard character two minutes to look up for one character and you've got you know something like
this where you don't know you don't know maybe like half the characters out boy you know takes
a long time we've unfortunately reached the end of the video I will see you all next time