6 comments

  1. Eric says:

    Hi Serge,

    I just started listening to your podcasts recently and I find they are very informative. You do a great job of explaining the vocabulary, providing usage examples, designing the dialogs, and a surprisingly good job on pronouciation. I was really happy to find in this lesson that you are expanding the role of the native speaker. She has a great voice and since her pronunciation is so different from yours, it helps us listeners get a better idea of what the language sounds like. I look forward to hearing more from her.

  2. Hi there!
    Thanks for listening. Summer is from Beijing, so her pronunciation is a bit different. You probably only listened to this lesson. If you start from the first lesson and subscribe for transcripts, you will learn that there are different accents in Mandarin Chinese and you will learn why Beijing dialect is so different from standard Putonghua.

    Happy New Year!

  3. Richard Land says:

    Hi,

    I am married to a Chinese woman (from Zhangzhou, it’s in Fujian Provence).
    Unfortunately she is not a good teacher (she is a good wife). I started
    studying Putonghua many years ago by new Chinese immigrants here in
    Toronto, in other words, I had many, many different teachers.
    I have also listened to a number of different methods.

    Now I just want to tell you that I have listened to two of your courses and
    they are really good. They are the best I have come across.

    So thank you for putting this online. I wish I had known of its existence
    earlier.

    Once again, I really want to thank you for this really thoughtful clear and
    concise course. Instead of Christmas, though, I would have liked to be able
    to substitute Hannukah, Passover, …

    thanks,

    Richard

  4. Dan says:

    I love and appreciate these lessons which my daughter and I have loaded into an mp3 player. My fiancee is also teaching us Mandarine, though she went back to Australia to finish her contract so we’re without a teacher for a few months, and since her mother speaks Mandarine and I intend to see her before Eileen and I marry, I’ll need to learn Mandarine fast.

    As for Christmas, I disagree with the person who wished to see Hannukah and passover “instead” of Christmas and would prefer to see them “in addition” rather than “instead”. Some people, both Christians and Jews, often forget that Christianity is at its roots a very Jewish religion, that Jesus was a Jew who quoted from the old testament and supported it and that the disciples or apostles were also Jews as were most of the first Christians. But, it would be nice also to know more about Chinese celebrations, Chinese new year and such.

    Dan

  5. gweipo says:

    I really like the closing music to this pod-cast – is it from a CD that is commercially available? Do you have transcripts of the words?

    Thanks

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