Our part-time driver, Mr. Lu has been working very hard to learn english and has done a pretty good job so far. He and Lisa negotiated a deal to trade language lessons and for the past 2 nights, he spent 2 hours a night learning the difference between skirt and shirt and a dozen other things he was confused about. In exchange, we have learned a lot about speaking Chinese. He’s given a good start on how to pronounce the 4 tones because they repurpose words with different tones to derive completely different meanings. Here’s an example that we worked on…I’m representing this phonetically so I don’t have to explain Pinyin (the western representation of Chinese words).
shoo (high pitch no change in tone) - book
shoo (low to high) - food
shoooo (high to low to high) - rat
shu (sharp drop from high to low) - tree
Lot’s of people say it’s a hard language, but it’s actually pretty fun because of these tones and sounds that westerners can’t make. I practiced saying “re” (means hot) with a driver today. It’s sounds more like “yloo-er” with the third tone (high low high) but only one syllable. At any rate, it’s hard not to be in a good mood after spending some time around Mr. Lu.
Leave a Reply