Something I should have done a long time ago is to label everything in our flat in Chinese. Alicia was out quite a bit over the weekend and so I took the opportunity to run around the flat labelling everything in Chinese. She came back last night and just laughed: “You forgot 镜子 [jìngzi], mirror.”
The design of the #MandarinMonday website is centred around having an archive of all tweets tagged with the hashtag #MandarinMonday. Rather than write a stand-alone script to search Twitter and archive these tweets, I decided to package it all up as a self contained Wordpress plugin. I am now sharing this plugin (my first ever [...]
Over the last week I ran a poll over on TwtPoll asking what people thought I should do with the mandarinmonday.com domain. The poll closed yesterday and now that the results are in, it is time to get coding and see what I can make of #MandarinMonday.
At the start of every class my teacher says to us, “Spend a couple of minutes talking amongst yourselves in Chinese.” My mind goes blank and suddenly I have nothing to say. But why is this? Is it that, in the early stages of learning a new language, we are required to scale back our thought processes and try and speak like a child again? Or is it just that we don’t know just how much we do know?
This week saw the birth of #MandarinMonday on Twitter. There are no rules to #MandarinMonday as the idea behind it was to encourage people learning Chinese to use their Mandarin. Just turn up, tweet in Mandarin and use the #MandarinMonday hashtag.
