Still sick. Can you believe it? I’m actually rather glad that my Octagon training is on hiatus this week while the CPod folks enjoy the Chinese New Year.
In other news, I watched a movie with Andy Lau the other day called Battle of Wits. It was a pretty good period drama (without wires!) and I had a good time following the Mandarin along with the subtitles. I’m finding that I can recognize short sentences pretty well, but longer ones, even when I know all the words, would be lost on me without the translations provided. It’s for this reason that I recommend getting your hands on movies in Mandarin and taking in as much as you can. It really helps.
Oh, and remember those regular features I talked about? Well, one of them (the one that’s been delayed twice now) is a Friday Five feature, where I conduct a short weekly interview with a member of the ChinesePod staff. I thought this would be a great way for you to get to know the people who bring us such awesome content day after day. I fired off a volley of questions for a bunch of folks but I haven’t heard back from them yet. (They did agree to do the interviews, though, so it’s just a matter of wrangling the answers out of them now!)
While we wait, I’m afraid that this Friday Five might have to be an interview with yours truly. So. Anybody got any questions for me? I promise to answer anything that’s not a matter of national security or would embarrass me in front of my mom.
Fire away!
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Not sure if you meant to post questions on here or via email, so here goes:
Important interview question #1: As an author, whose writings do you enjoy reading and who do you count as an influence?
Important interview question #2: Peanut butter: chunky or smooth?
Hey Frank, I’ve got a few questions for you. I’m definitely a newbie learner (since August) and even a more recent poster. You may have answered this in one of your past entries, but I’ll ask anyway. You recently posted that you graduated out of the newbie lessons on to the elementary. How long did that take? And where do you feel you were as a Mandarin learner before coming to C-Pod. I mean had you had any schooling prior to learning with C-Pod or was it totally new.
Then, how did you decide that you had graduated? Did Ken and Jenny send you a certificate of completion, with a bunch of gold stars, (because that would be really cool), or was it something that you kind of decided on your own.
I’m trying to find a way to gage my own progress and pick up some tips as well. Because I don’t have a lot of time, just like everyone else, I usually listen to the lessons on my very short commute to and from work. I listen to two lessons at a time and just repeat them over for four or five days. My thinking is to expose my self to as much hearing of the language as possible. When my daughters were very young it was easy to tell they understood what we were saying by their reactions to our conversations, even though they couldn’t speak themselves. So I’ve adopted the same methodology. Because it worked for them I’m sure it will work for me as well.
I do supplement this with the dialogue sheets. I’ll sit down once maybe twice a week with the dialogue sheet and make notes as I listen along. Any thoughts would be appreciated.
So Frank, If you could go for hotpot with any person living or dead, who would it be?