Christmas Vocabulary PART 1

In this video lesson, we're going to introduce you some Christmas vocabulary! 



Classes

- 1 on 1 Chinese class in Hsinchu city

- small group Chinese class (2-4people) in Hsinchu city

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Please feel free to contact me here at

smartmandarinchinese@gmail.com (Katrina Lee)

Chinese Character Classification 1

Chinese Character Classification 1

All Chinese characters are logograms, but several different types can be identified, based on the manner in which they are formed or derived. There are a handful which derive from pictographs (象形 pinyin: xiàngxíng) and a number which are ideographic (指事 zhǐshì) in origin, including compound ideographs (會意 huìyì), but the vast majority originated as phono-semantic compounds (形聲 xíngshēng). The other categories in the traditional system of classification are rebus or phonetic loan characters (假借 jiǎjiè) and "derivative cognates" (轉注 zhuǎn zhù). Modern scholars have proposed various revised systems, rejecting some of the traditional categories.

Pictograms

(象形 xiàng xíng, "form imitation")

Chinese characters are pictograms (象形 xiàng xíng, "form imitation") — drawings of the objects they represent. These are generally among the oldest characters.

   

  

Ideograms (指事 zhǐ shì, "indication")

deograms (指事 zhǐ shì, "indication") express an abstract idea through an iconic form, including iconic modification of pictographic characters. In the examples below, low numerals are represented by the appropriate number of strokes, directions by an iconic indication above and below a line, and the parts of a tree by marking the appropriate part of a pictogram of a tree.

Character	一	二	三	上	下	本	末
Pinyin	yī	èr	sān	shàng	xià	běn	mò
Gloss	one	two	three	up	below	root	apex

·         本 běn "root" - a tree (木 mù) with the base indicated by an extra stroke.

·         末 mò "apex" - the reverse of 本 (běn), a tree with the top highlighted by an extra stroke.

Compound ideographs

(會意 huì yì, "joined meaning")

Compound ideographs (會意 huì yì, "joined meaning"), are compounds of two or more pictographic or ideographic characters to suggest the meaning of the word to be represented.

Characters commonly explained as compound ideographs include:

1.       信 "truthful", formed from 人 "person" (later reduced to 亻) and 言 "speech"

2.       林 lín "grove", composed of two trees

3.       森 sēn "forest", composed of three trees

4.       休 xiū "shade, rest", depicting a man by a tree

Jiajie (假借 jiǎjiè, "borrowing; making use of")

Jiajie (假借 jiǎjiè, "borrowing; making use of") are characters that are "borrowed" to write another homophonous or near-homophonous morpheme.

For example, the character 來 was originally a pictogram of a wheat plant and meant "wheat". As this was pronounced similarly to the Old Chinese word lai "to come", 來 was also used to write this verb. Eventually the more common usage, the verb "to come", became established as the default reading of the character 來, and a new character 麥 was devised for "wheat". (The modern pronunciations are lái and mài.) When a character is used as a rebus this way, it is called a jiajiezi 假借字 (lit. "loaned and borrowed character")

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Dear students,

We organized some information about Chinese characters to help you have more understanding of our characters. ;)

** Information from Wikipedia.

SMART Mandarin 

Katrina Lee

About Chinese Characters

About Chinese Characters

Chinese characters In Standard Chinese, they are called hanzi (simplified Chinese: 汉字; traditional Chinese: 漢字, lit "Han characters"). They have been adapted to write a number of other languages, including Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese.

In Old Chinese (and Classical Chinese, which is based on it), most words were monosyllabic and there was a close correspondence between characters and words. In modern Chinese (esp. Mandarin Chinese), characters do not necessarily correspond to words; indeed the majority of Chinese words today consist of two or more characters.

Modern Chinese has many homophones; thus the same spoken syllable may be represented by many characters, depending on meaning. A single character may also have a range of meanings, or sometimes quite distinct meanings; occasionally these correspond to different pronunciations.

Chinese characters represent words of the language using several strategies. A few characters, including some of the most commonly used, were originally pictograms, which depicted the objects denoted, or ideograms, in which meaning was expressed iconically. The vast majority were written using the rebus principle, in which a character for a similarly sounding word was either simply borrowed or (more commonly) extended with a disambiguating semantic marker to form a phono-semantic compound character. The traditional six-fold classification (liùshū 六书 / 六書 "six writings") was first described by the scholar 許慎Xu Shen in the postrace of his dictionary 說文解字Shuowen Jiezi in 100 AD.

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Dear students,

We organized some information about Chinese characters to help you have more understanding of our characters. ;)

** Information from Wikipedia.

SMART Mandarin 

Katrina Lee

Chinese Measure Words Practice

In this video lesson, we're going to practice and review the measure words of Mandarin with you!!

If you don't know what is measure word, then we suggest you check out our previous videos before watching this one!

Measure Words in Chinese

How to use measure words

And if you are interested in having a lesson with us, please contact us here at
smartmandarinchinese@gmail.com (Katrina Lee)


Our Mandarin Courses
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www.smartmandarinchinese.com

How to Study a New Foreign Language

In this video, I'm using my own experience of learning a foreign language to share you how to learn/study Mandarin more effectively by using online video lessons and resources!



It will save you a tons of money and you can keep your schedule flexible at the same time! ;)



If you are interested in having online lessons with us :)



SMART Mandarin Chinese Lessons 
- Skype Chinese lesson
- Online audio & video lessons
- 1 on 1 & small group Chinese lesson in Hsinchu city
Contact :
smartmandarinchinese@gmail.com (Katrina Lee)

How to Study a New Foreign Language

In this video, I'm using my own experience of learning a foreign language to share you how to learn/study Mandarin more effectively by using online video lessons and resources!



It will save you a tons of money and you can keep your schedule flexible at the same time! ;)



If you are interested in having online lessons with us :)



SMART Mandarin Chinese Lessons 
- Skype Chinese lesson
- Online audio & video lessons
- 1 on 1 & small group Chinese lesson in Hsinchu city
Contact :
smartmandarinchinese@gmail.com (Katrina Lee)

A Good Idea to Improve Your Chinese Speaking with Online Lessons!

A Good Idea to Improve Your Chinese Lpeaking with Online Lessons

Do you sometimes feel don’t know what to do or how to improve your pronunciation and speaking in Mandarin especially when you are studying with online material alone?

Are you trying to watch some video lessons online, study with textbooks but still wonder if your Chinese speaking, pronunciation and listening have improved?

Is there ever a solution to these problems?

Yes!

Aside from looking for a language exchange partner, which you can do it of course, there’s another way that we can provide to help!

If you are learning from our audio & video lessons, you can send us a recording of you practicing Chinese, let us listen to your pronunciation, structures and everything then we’ll send you an audio file as our feedback to correct your mistakes in Mandarin! ;)

Here’s our email which you can send us your recording : smartmandarinchinese@gmial.com (Katrina Lee)

Also, we’ll send you “homework” from time to time, then you can follow our homework instructions to improve.

Now, are you ready to begin your journey of studying with us?

Hope to see you in class soon! ;)

Purchase Our Online Lesson (Click)

Our Website (Click)

SMART Mandarin

Katrina Lee

Start Your Online Chinese Lesson NOW!!

Start Your Online Chinese Lesson NOW!! 

SMART Mandarin online audio & video lessons ranging from total beginner level to intermediate.

New videos upload regularly, access to all levels of audio & video lessons, interactive Q&A section under each video, classroom experience at home, and it's budget friendly!!

Four Packages 

Using PayPal account, credit card, or debit card to pay for your lesson! :) 

Skype Chinese lesson is also available NOW!

inquiry : smartmandarinchinese@gmail.com (Katrina Lee)

Classes
- 1 on 1 Chinese class in Hsinchu city
- small group Chinese class (2-4people) in Hsinchu city
- Online Skype Chinese lesson

- Online audio & video lessons

Hope to see you in class soon! ;)

Katrina Lee

3 Steps of Learning a Foreign Language- SMART Mandarin

3 Steps of Learning a Foreign Language

Have you ever wonder why is it so hard to learn a new language?

Are there any tips or shortcuts of learning it?

Well…you’ve probably known the cliché which we all have been told “Practice makes perfect!”. Well.. There’s a reason why it’s a cliché because it works!

For me, I would say “Practice makes perfect, and consistency is the key.”

To practice and use a new foreign language, it requires lots of effort, time, practices, and passion and on top of that – consistency makes you improve the most!

Of course, we need some guidance and steps to move forward little by little. And here are simple 3 steps of learning a new language from my point of view!

One: Learning & Absorbing

Yes, this is a first baby step when you start learning anything! You just have to attend a class, learn from a good, experienced, patience, and probably a fun-loving teacher to motivate you to learn.

Make sure you understand the lesson and really absorb the basic rules, logic of the language since there might be a huge difference between your mother tongue and the language you’re learning.

Two: Digesting, Reviewing, and Remembering what you’ve learned!

The step 2 is mainly your work at home after class.

This is what I always tell my students “Please REVIEW after each lesson, please!” You can’t remember all the things without doing some review. It’s very important without saying of course.

Make sure you understand and learned what you have taught in the class.

Three: Practicing

If you have any experience of learning a new foreign language, you know that learning a language and using it are two different things!!

Say for example: While I’m learning German, I feel that I can understand more by reading, and when I close my book only using my ears to listen to German, it feels totally different!!! I have to understand what a native speaker says immediately, and to respond as soon as I can!!  

The more you listen, the better you can understand what people say. The more you practice your speaking, the faster you respond to people and faster you can find the correct vocabulary, sentence structures in your speaking.

These steps are the standard SOP of learning any new foreign languages. They are all very important and you have to do it consistently no matter what!!!

Keep studying hard with PASSION. 加油(Jiayou)！！

SMART Mandarin

- online Chinese audio & video lessons

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Contact :

smartmandarinchinese@gmail.com

(Katrina Lee)

Katrina Lee

Learn How to Speak Chinese with New Vocabulary 1

In this video, you'll learn 6 vocabulary of Chinese and learn how to make sentences.



This is the very first video that we try to speak more Mandarin to explain in Chinese also we put on the subtitle while explaining in Chinese.



It's a great opportunity to practice your listening and speaking  at the same time. There will be more videos like this coming up in the near future. And we hope it really help you with your study! ;)



Please let us know what you think of this change of our lesson :)

If you are interested in our courses. You can go to

www.smartmandarinchinese.com



- online Chinese audio & video lessons

- Chinese Skype lesson



Contact us here

smartmandarinchinese@gmail.com (Katrina Lee)

My Experience of Learning a New Language - German 3

My Experience of Learning a New Language - German

A Brand New Languages – Don’t Know Where to Start…..

Like most people, it’s always hard in the beginning to start something new. Well…even I’m a professional Mandarin teacher, doesn’t mean I know how to learn German. So I Googled a bit of how to learn German and where I can find a German lesson in my city.

Unfortunately, I can’t find any good German teacher in my city, only in Taipei. (The capital city of Taiwan, which is 1.5 hour by train from me)

So I started to study by myself by a book I purchased in a bookstore.

I started in February 2017 by the book and some YouTube videos. I knew that I was going to just learn some basic conversations and vocabulary. I tried to learn some sentences in German by the book.

Then I soon realized that, GERMAN IS NOTHING LIKE CHINESE OR ENGLISH!!!!!!!

I can’t form proper sentences without knowing the grammar of German, because German grammar is very complicated, you need to know subject (Nominitiv), object (Akkusativ) and Dativ (a different kind of object), not to mention there are feminine, masculine and neutral differences with the nouns of German.

Let’s take a quick example to see the difference between Mandarin and German.

Example :  I would like to give him a book. (English)

我想要給他一本書。（Wǒ xiǎng yào gěi tā yī běnshū） (Mandarin)

ich möchten ihm ein Buch geben.  (German)

In Mandarin, if you know all the vocabulary, then you can form a sentence.

Because Mandarin doesn’t have any changes with our verbs or nouns.

So in Mandarin we just say “ I would like to give him a book”. EASY!

In German, on the other hand, that’s a totally different story. The structure in this case would be “ subject + would like to + Dative for indirective object + Akkusative for directive object (also need to check the gender of the noun) + verb”

Okay…if you don’t understand what it means above…as least you understand that German is much more complicated than Mandarin in grammar, right?

I basically wasted a whole month learning the wrong way. 

Like most people, I felt frustrated then I stopped learning for a few months until I found an online course…

In July 2017 I restarted learning since I found a teacher online and he offers online video lessons which is basically like what I do with my Mandarin course on my website. In case you are curious where I learn my German, here is the website where I learn it.(http://www.bismarck-besmart.com.tw/)

I got sooooo excited that I found this teacher and his German course.

For many reasons….

1.      He’s doing the same business as I’m doing with German. And I want to see how it works for me as a student.

2.      I finally can start learning German properly with a professional teacher with a good guidance!!

3.      I can learn German with videos 24/7, I love studying with my own pace. And I sometimes feel pressure practice with a teacher in class since I always think I need more time to digest what I learn then practice.

Now, I’ve just finished A1 level of German!!! YES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

And here is how I learn German with video lessons.

l   I watch the videos and take notes.

l   I review after each lesson, if I’ve got any questions, I can mail or text my teacher to ask my questions. It’s very convenient!

l   I asked my German friend to help me record the German conversations or sentences I learned from the videos. So I can listen to the recording audio and review with my smartphone.

l   When I listen to the recording from my friend or CDs, I always repeat a few times myself to make sure I pronounce it correctly.

How do I know if I pronounce things correctly or how do I have more oral practices without a teacher?

I know it’s very important to find someone who can correct your pronunciation or

practice with you regularly. But you can also do it without a real teacher, just like

me ;) How?

Okay, when I repeat after the teacher on the video or practice with my friend’s

audio, I always listen to my friend’s pronunciation very carefully!!!! You have to

really open your ears to listen!!!!!!! So you can pronounce better.

As for speaking or practicing to have a conversation…

I think I’m now only repeating and learning the sentences from the conversations of

my textbook or the material which my teacher gave me. If I make any sentences and

I’m not sure if it’s correct, I just send it to my German friend or teacher and let them

correct me or sometimes I use Google Translate.  Hahaha))))  :P

You can try doing the same with studying

Mandarin Chinese!

One of the reasons I chose to learn German with video lessons was because I want to

do an experiment on myself and see how it works on me with German. So I can share

my experience to my students who is learning Chinese with my video lessons!!

Now, it’s been 3.5 months and I’ve finished A1 level. So I would like to give you some

suggestions on how to learn Chinese with video lessons by yourself! J

1.      Watch the video lesson at your own pace, be patience and take notes.

2.      Review the lesson with the PDF file after each video and read the sentences aloud!

3.      If you find learning with one resource is too boring, please go to a bookstore and find some other interesting materials, as long as it makes you happy! But remember, you need one MAIN material to help your learning step by step!!

4.      Any questions about learning Chinese, just mail me!

5.      Find a native speaker of Chinese to listen to you and help you with your pronunciation of Chinese. He or she can do some recording for you.

6.      Please DO NOT ask your Chinese friend any questions about grammar!!! Random Chinese native speaker can’t explain grammar!! Please ask a professional teacher your grammatical questions!!

7.      Finally, if you feel more confident speaking Chinese, please find a language exchange partner and keep watching Chinese video lessons to learn new structures and vocabulary of Chinese!

                                       

by Katrina Lee 

SMART Mandarin 

www.smartmandarinchinese.com

- online audio & video lessons

- Skype Chinese lesson