{"id":1001105,"date":"2008-04-18T07:00:20","date_gmt":"2008-04-18T12:00:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/travel\/2008\/04\/18\/wanted-a-course-in-pidgin-mandarin\/"},"modified":"2008-04-18T16:19:46","modified_gmt":"2008-04-18T21:19:46","slug":"wanted-a-course-in-pidgin-mandarin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/travel\/2008\/04\/18\/wanted-a-course-in-pidgin-mandarin\/","title":{"rendered":"Wanted: A Course in Pidgin Mandarin"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>One thing this trip to Beijing has brought out is just how useful it would be to speak even a little Mandarin here, even if one can&#8217;t reasonably converse or understand spoken Mandarin. Maybe a week&#8217;s worth of basic vocabulary and phrases: <\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Yes<\/li>\n<li>No<\/li>\n<li>I don&#8217;t speak Chinese.<\/li>\n<li>Cell phone<\/li>\n<li>Too Expensive<\/li>\n<li>No meat<\/li>\n<li>Duck<\/li>\n<li>Chicken<\/li>\n<li>Beef<\/li>\n<li>Rice<\/li>\n<li>Noodles<\/li>\n<li>Water<\/li>\n<li>Tea<\/li>\n<li>Coffee<\/li>\n<li>Diet Coke<\/li>\n<li>How much?<\/li>\n<li>Skim Milk<\/li>\n<li>Hello<\/li>\n<li>Goodbye<\/li>\n<li>Thank you<\/li>\n<li>Not now<\/li>\n<li>Maybe later<\/li>\n<li>I don&#8217;t know<\/li>\n<li>I understand<\/li>\n<li>Turn right<\/li>\n<li>Turn left<\/li>\n<li>You&#8217;re going the wrong way<\/li>\n<li>Down the sidewalk!<\/li>\n<li>Oh my God I&#8217;m going to die and I still haven&#8217;t seen the giant pandas!<\/li>\n<li>etc.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>That plus basic numbers, Pinyin pronunciation, some simple rules of etiquette (you ride in the front seat of the cab in Beijing), and perhaps a few common and useful Chinese characters would make navigating this city a lot easier. Also, I wouldn&#8217;t object to a refresher course in chopsticks, the utensils, not the piano solo.<\/p>\n<p>However I specifically do not want a syllabus that focuses on complete sentences and proper grammar. Berlitz is great, but it assumes you&#8217;re just getting started on a course of study that will take years. This may makes sense for European countries, where you have to reach a level of fluency the Europeans have with English before you have any hope of conversing natively, but for a much less Anglophone environment like China, something faster and dirtier would be very helpful. Does anyone actually offer a course that lets you get away with atrocious, horrible grammar as long as you&#8217;re understandable?and that doesn&#8217;t take years to complete?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>One thing this trip to Beijing has brought out is just how useful it would be to speak even a little Mandarin here, even if one can&#8217;t reasonably converse or understand spoken Mandarin. Maybe a week&#8217;s worth of basic vocabulary and phrases: Yes No I don&#8217;t speak Chinese. Cell phone Too Expensive No meat Duck [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[410],"class_list":["post-1001105","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-travel","tag-flash"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1001105","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1001105"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1001105\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1001105"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1001105"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1001105"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}