Michelle's New Place to Vent: April 2005

Saturday, April 30, 2005

Guitar

I picked up the Guitar yesterday. Man I gotta say, I want my calluses back...
they are still reddish swollen today..

Man, I need to be motivated to be a great guitar player, of course country songs only.

Lazy students...

Would you ever be too lazy to say the "P" in pepsi????

yes it happened today. I got a student who's so lazy, he doesn't wanna say the "P" in pepsi....
can I say ridiculous?? we spent 5 mins arguing why he should say the "P" in pepsi but he still thinks that people can understand him...

Monday, April 25, 2005

Learning Chinese

so, one of my students ask me to teach him Chinese and in return he'll teach me Spanish. Heck why not! he's cute anyway.
no no that's not it, he's teaching me Spanish for free and I love teaching Chinese anyway.

So, I was trying to review my Chinese and started surfing, I found interesting stuff.

This is the Taiwanese way of "spelling" out words: http://www.liwin.com/zhuyin/
Although I learned the Taiwanese way first, I didn't find it particularly effective. I prefer the Hanyu Pinyin, the Chinese way from China, which was what I learned in Singapore.

Strangly found out a lot of things I didn't know before, like how do you "spell" Grandpa in chinese?? In the Taiwanese BO PO MO, you have to do Ge Wu Eng (because "Ong" doesn't exist in Taiwanese BO PO MO), which becomes Gueng rather than Gong, but they still say gong for some reason. It just doesn't make sense......
but in Hanyu Pinyin, there's Eng and Also Ong, therefore Dream is Meng, and Grandpa is Gong.
don't know if it makes sense to you. But anyway, trust me, Hanyu Pinyin is definitly more effective, and that's what i'm using to teach Chinese....

so if you are interested, here are some information:

25 out of 26 English alphabet letters are used in Pinyin. Letter 'v' is not used, while letter ' ü ' is added to represent the vowel sound of 'yu'.

Pinyin includes consonants and vowel letters.

1. Consonant letters

There are 20 consonant letters use in Mandarin (three consonants are represented by combinations of two letters - 'zh', 'ch' and 'sh'), they are:

b, p, m, f, d, t, n, l, g, k, h, j, q, x, z, c, s, zh, ch, sh, r, y, w

2. Vowel letters

There are 6 vowel letters used in Mandarin:

a, o, e, i, u, ü

3. Syllables

Syllables are composed by consonants, vowels and tone.

The consonant that begins a syllable is initial (listen to the pronunciation in mp3 format online at http://www.learn-chinese-language-online.com/chinese-pinyin-initials.html) , they can be:

b, p, m, f, d, t, n, l, g, k, h, j, q, x, z, c, s, zh, ch, sh, r, y, w

The rest parts after the initial are finals. Final ( listen to the pronunciation in mp3 format online at http://www.learn-chinese-language-online.com/chinese-pinyin-finals.html ) can be a single vowel, a combination of vowels, or combination of vowels and nasals 'n' or 'ng':

There are 6 simple finals which are single vowels, they are : a, o, e, i, u, ü .

The others are compound finals, they are:

ai, ao, ou, ei, ia, ie, iao, iou, ua, uo, uai, uei, üe,
an, ang, ong, en, eng, in, ing, ian, iang, iong, uen, ueng, uan, uang, ün, üan

The combination of 21 initials and 33 finals in Mandarin romanization (there are five more finals, but they share the same symbols as other finals) form about 420 different sounds.

A word consists of initial + final + tone. In some cases, the initial can be omitted.

Although most of the sounds are generally close to how they are used and pronounced in English, some don't follow English letters exactly and are pronounced differently.

Pay extra attention to the differences and listen closely to each Chinese sound, it takes practices to pronounce correctly.

So it's pretty interesting huh? You should try listening to the sounds on the link above.
Also, here's a chart of all the sounds you can emit in Chinese, and I tell you, the list is looooong!! http://www.lib.uchicago.edu/e/easia/pinyin.html

Anyway, Chinese is pretty facinating...

Friday, April 22, 2005

Simple Egg Drop Soup

So have you ever tried making egg drop soup and the egg turned out all broken up and your soup instead of having pieces of smooth egg became "eggy soup"??

Well, I have. So I learned how to make really good egg drop soup

Ingredients
Eggs. I usually use 1 per person
Canned Sweet Corn
Green onion
Chicken Broth
White pepper
Salt
Corn Starch

It's really easy.
First, boil some water and add chicken broth to the water to add flavor. This is the secret to really good chicken broth.

Next, beat the eggs. Chop up green onions. Prepare a medium bowl of Corn Starch mixed w/ water.

When the water/broth comes to a boil, dump in the corn. Taste it and see if it's salty enough. If not, add salt.

Now, remove it from the heat, stir in the corn starch until the soup thickens.

Put the soup back on the heat, bring to boil, then turn off the heat and remove the soup from the stove.

Oh, you probably want to ask me about the eggs. Yes, you add the eggs now, after you've removed it from the heat, so that the eggs can be smooth.

There, you're done. Add white pepper and green onions before serving.

I promise it's good.

Friday, April 15, 2005

World Problems

I was in one of the classrooms for higher levels (level 10) today at work. I saw on the wall a huge piece of butcher paper with the world map drawn on, and post-its on it.
Each of the post-it was labeling a country, about 20 or so labeled and my first impression was like "oh they're learning about the names of the countries"
but after examining it, under the names of the countries, there were words like "polygamy", "Children eating", "Sex slaves".

I assumed that those are the topics they talk about in class to get the students participate in talking over Moral issues around the world.
China was the only country that has the "fetus consumption" label and United States is the only country with the "Abortion" label. I really don't think US is the only country with that problem though. Anyway, but to my surprise, US also has "Sex Slaves", specifically Asian sex slaves...
interesting huh?

Thursday, April 14, 2005

So I do apologize

I've been caught up with the Chinese soap opera my mom brought over for me... It's about one of the most famous emperor in Chinese history, in the Qin Dynasty, Kang Xi (Kang Shi). There were a lot of real facts, not just all stories, and it was very interesting. So I'm reading up more on the history online:
http://www.travelchinaguide.com/intro/history/
It's so cool! But strangly, I really like Chinese history, reading it for over 15 mins still puts me to sleep.