Yesterday evening (Sunday) we helped a brother move in to his new apartment about a block from us. This brother has been here in Taiwan for 9 years and is fluent in Chinese but after graduating from BSSB he was assigned to an English congregation near by in Taichung. He got a really nice little studio apartment and unlike most of the places here he didn't have to do a thorough cleaning before moving in. This was because the previous tenant was just kicked out for not paying either his rent or electric bill. The apartment was just re done so it looks very nice. The only down side was that it was night and the electricity to the apartment wasn't turned on yet. So we stumbled around and put things where ever we could find a spot then the brother lit some candles and went to get some food for everyone.
When he returned we enjoyed some interesting new food and some familiar things. Including fries both regular and sweet potato, deep fried chicken chunks, deep fried fish guts ( I didn't try that) and a few other things. We also enjoyed some tea Hannah had a really good passion fruit tea that was like an Icee, I had a lemon tea that was also really good.
Today (Monday) We had our first quiz in our main class. It had three parts, First the teacher said a word and we had to circle it from an option of 4 different words, some where the same word with only the tone making the difference. Second she said two words and we had to write down what she said in PinYin with the correct tone. Last we had Three questions written in PinYin that we had to write our answer in PinYin. The questions were "Ni Jiao shenme mingzi?" -What is your name. "Ni jia you ji ge ren?" -How many people in your family? and "Ni xi huan shenme dong wu" - What animals do you like?
After the quiz we started with characters. Today was not an intense study of them just a introduction to them. She started by showing us some of the ancient characters from Jia gu wen or "oracle bone script" where they carved their writing on to turtle shells or deer skulls. From there she showed the progression of how it changed as time went on to what we have today. Looking at some of the old characters they made sense and I could understand why they used them but with most as it progressed I couldn't see the relation any more.
After going over that and explaining that not all characters look like what they are describing but some do. she told us that you can sometimes guess the meaning of a character you don't know by noticing part of it that you do know like if a character has 人 or 亻(another form of ren which means people) then that character probably has to do with people in some way like 們 (men used to make it plural like 我們 women = us, 他們 tamen = them, 你們 nimen = all of you). so since men has the radical for ren ( 亻) then you can guess that it is talking about people. Confused yet? Yeah me too :)
After class we thought we had our electives so I headed to He Fenfen's class and Hannah stayed in the same room since she has Lin Weiling for her elective as well. When I got to class He Fenfen said that she had me down for Tuesday, Thursday but that if I wanted she could switch me to Monday, Wednesday. I said yes because I wanted to have the same schedule as Hannah. So we started class and a few minutes later there is a knock on the door it is Hannah and Lin Weiling telling me I am in the wrong class. apparently they switched us both to Tuesday, Thursday since Hannah was also in the wrong class. Funny side story: Hannah was a little nervous to interrupt He Fenfen's class and she asked Lin Weiling if she thought she should. Lin Weiling kinda shrunk back and said "Oooh... He Fenfen?" like she was scared of her too.
Since we no longer had class we headed home. We ran a few errands and then about 5:30 we went to the hall to meet the brother to pick up our new scooter :) Well that is about it for now until next time.
Love Phil and Hannah.
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| A candle lit move |
Today (Monday) We had our first quiz in our main class. It had three parts, First the teacher said a word and we had to circle it from an option of 4 different words, some where the same word with only the tone making the difference. Second she said two words and we had to write down what she said in PinYin with the correct tone. Last we had Three questions written in PinYin that we had to write our answer in PinYin. The questions were "Ni Jiao shenme mingzi?" -What is your name. "Ni jia you ji ge ren?" -How many people in your family? and "Ni xi huan shenme dong wu" - What animals do you like?
After the quiz we started with characters. Today was not an intense study of them just a introduction to them. She started by showing us some of the ancient characters from Jia gu wen or "oracle bone script" where they carved their writing on to turtle shells or deer skulls. From there she showed the progression of how it changed as time went on to what we have today. Looking at some of the old characters they made sense and I could understand why they used them but with most as it progressed I couldn't see the relation any more.
After going over that and explaining that not all characters look like what they are describing but some do. she told us that you can sometimes guess the meaning of a character you don't know by noticing part of it that you do know like if a character has 人 or 亻(another form of ren which means people) then that character probably has to do with people in some way like 們 (men used to make it plural like 我們 women = us, 他們 tamen = them, 你們 nimen = all of you). so since men has the radical for ren ( 亻) then you can guess that it is talking about people. Confused yet? Yeah me too :)
After class we thought we had our electives so I headed to He Fenfen's class and Hannah stayed in the same room since she has Lin Weiling for her elective as well. When I got to class He Fenfen said that she had me down for Tuesday, Thursday but that if I wanted she could switch me to Monday, Wednesday. I said yes because I wanted to have the same schedule as Hannah. So we started class and a few minutes later there is a knock on the door it is Hannah and Lin Weiling telling me I am in the wrong class. apparently they switched us both to Tuesday, Thursday since Hannah was also in the wrong class. Funny side story: Hannah was a little nervous to interrupt He Fenfen's class and she asked Lin Weiling if she thought she should. Lin Weiling kinda shrunk back and said "Oooh... He Fenfen?" like she was scared of her too.
Since we no longer had class we headed home. We ran a few errands and then about 5:30 we went to the hall to meet the brother to pick up our new scooter :) Well that is about it for now until next time.
Love Phil and Hannah.
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