Nǐ hǎo 你好
你好 Primary 7,
Zěn me yàng? (怎么样?) For those of you who don’t already know me, I’m Sam. I attended Jordanhill last year and during my last year of school I was given the opportunity to study Mandarin for 10 months in a place called Tianjin, a city that is 70 miles south of Beijing. Over the next 10 months I will be letting the school and in particular, the Primary 7 classes know about how I’m getting on learning Mandarin in such a different environment at Tianjin Foreign Studies University.
It’s been almost a month since I landed in Beijing to begin my China adventure and already I’m settling into my new home. The trip by plane from Scotland to China took 20 hours in total with a small break in Doha, Qatar to refuel the plane.
Travelling to China
This is however not the first time I've been in China. In summer 2016 I participated in a course that involved coming out to China to study Mandarin and learn new things about the culture.
Have any of you visited China at all? And if you have, where did you go and do you still remember it?
For the first couple of days we had a chance to explore Tianjin. It is a very busy place because of the huge population of 15.47 million which is more than all of Scotland combined. But besides the many people, Tianjin is a beautiful city. Full of lights at night and skyscrapers all around.
Binjing Road, Tianjin
Tianjin Foreign Studies University Campus
As for the food it’s easy to say it’s different from back home. Most of you might be thinking it’s a Chinese takeaway but it’s not exactly. A lot of the time for me this month it’s been rice, dumplings or noodles for breakfast, lunch and dinner. It’s different but you get used to it after a couple of weeks.
Do you think you could eat rice, dumplings and noodles for breakfast, lunch and dinner?
Chinese food such as rice, dumplings and noodles
So far in Mandarin I have been learning the basics such as hello, how old are you and where do you come from. I’ve also been learning numbers and I understand that all of you have as well.
Do you think you could write the following words and numbers in pinyin, or even better in characters:
- 15
- Hello!
- 29
- How are you?
- 43
- Where do you come from?
- 66
- What age are you?
- 100
- Good morning!
That’s all for now, Zàijiàn (再见)