Lesson 6: Can you speak Chinese?
我会说一点。I have covered this lesson before and it was one of the few questions (and responses) I could give when I was in China. Even then I was only able to do this after a look from Alicia that said, “You understand this bit. Start listening.”
Dialogue:
A: 你会说普通话吗？
B: 我会说一点。你会说英语吗？
A: 英语？我不会说。
A: Can you speak Chinese?
B: I can speak a little. Can you speak English?
A: I can’t speak English.
Simple and yet so useful. I spotted something in this lesson which I think will be quite useful. Take a look at the characters 话 (hua4), meaning “speech”, and 说 (shuo1), meaning “to speak”. At first these looked like two completely separate characters to me. The only way I could remember these (as with all other Chinese characters) was through simple memorisation. But, a closer look at the characters reveals that the left hand parts are the same. (I would type the part I am referring to but I’m not sure how. It looks a bit like an “i”.) Alicia has always been telling me that half of each character conveys the meaning whilst the other half conveys the sound. I’m guessing that the part that looks like an “i” is the part that conveys “speech”. At last, I have found something logical and, for me at least, logical things are so much easier to remember.
One other thing worth pointing out is the simplicity of the numbers, 1, 2 & 3, in Chinese. You will notice the use of the character for the number 1 in the phrase 一点 meaning, “a little”.
1: 一
2: 二
3: 三
That’s all for now. As I am working through these lessons I am adding all the vocabulary into iFlash. I am hoping to add the audio to these flash-cards at some point and, if anyone is interested, these decks of flash-cards can be made public. There are already many of these flash-card resources available publicly, but I find that creating them is part of the learning process.
再见
菜鸟6 Can you speak Chinese? (Visit ChinesePod.com
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