Re-learn Chinese

I thankfully still speak fluently. Most people I know who came at my age speak sucky chinese. Plus, my dad tries to talk to me in English so I have no one to speak chinese to. and he makes me speak English back to my sister because she stutters.
However, i have a very hard time reading and writing. I can read okayish, but I can barely write “hi, my name is -”
in fact, i cant! i can recognize the characters but not write them.

Can’t it say “I’m putting this on hold for the foreseeable future?”

:-)

Anyway, there’s just not enough time in the day. And my motivation is low, because there’s no one to talk to here anyway. I’m saving this for when we live in Singapore, which we’re planning to do for a year or so at some point.

when i was a kid i could speak chinese like flawlessly, then i moved to the U.S and i pretty much forgot how to speak chinese. i gotta re learn it otherwise i wont be able to speak with my cousins here cuz their english sucks alot

I have a friend who wants to learn Chinese. I offered to teach him basic Chinese, so I can brush up my own as well.

I think it’s good for me, I ended up re-reading my basic Chinese lesson books and got reminded of all the characters I’ve forgoten.

This is fun—today we ended up talking about Chinese food, which circumvented the prolonged silences as people try to think of things they can say using their limited vocabularies. Everyone has something to say about food!

One of my colleagues, who learned Mandarin when she was in the Peace Corps, organized a Chinese conversation group at work. Four of us met today at lunch and stumbled through some interesting sentences. It was actually very cute, and lots of fun. Hopefully it will become a weekly gig!

“The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step” said a very famous Chinese philosopher, I’m not sure who (there are so many of them! Lao Tze, Sun Tzu, etc)

I downloaded and installed WordLookup, a free dictionary for Mac, on my iBook. Url: http://www.lindesay.co.nz/page_wordlookup.shtml

And then downloaded English – Simplified Chinese and English – Traditional Chinese language data. Urls available from the same website.

I played around a bit with it and it’s nice – input a word (in English or in Chinese) and it’ll give out a list of words and phrases, complete with the Chinese character and pinyin pronounciation.

As I used to be in intermediate level in Chinese (and then fall back to beginner mode, as a result of years not using it), I’m familiar with characters, pinyin, pronunciations, and tones. I can use it.

I recommend WordLookup to anyone re-learning Chinese (and on a Mac). It’ll certainly enrich your vocabulary – which is the bulk part of learning Chinese.

I’m starting a list of pages to translate on my del.icio.us.

I just ordered a book to build my Mandarin vocabulary, since I have a pretty firm (albeit intuitive) grasp on the grammatical structure of chinese, I just know too few words. It has exercises you can fill out, which I tell you, made my heart flutter when I saw them. I used to hate my Chinese classes, and now I’m getting light-headed over fill-in-the-blank worksheets…

... has several levels of Chinese course materials available online, including entire textbooks and listening materials.