Lesson 009. Weather and Seasons.
How’s the weather today? Is it hot in summer in your country? Learn other phrases and vocabulary related to weather and seasons. Lesson’s vocabulary includes such words as ‘today’, ‘yesterday’, ‘tomorrow’, names of the months and numbers from 1 to 12. Learn about four seasons of the year: Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter and much more!
Hi Serge,
Keep up the good work!
Just one question about the transcripts and worksheets though. I notice you use traditional characters, any reason why you prefer these over the simplified ones? I have started already with simplified. This isn’t a big problem as I can convert any differences as part of the learning process. I was just wondering what your opinion was.
Well, I thought about it. Maybe it’s better to use simplified characters as majority of people who learn Chinese nowdays plan to have something to do with Mainland China, like business, travel, etc.
In fact, I do not emphasize written language in my lessons as I don’t really know how to teach writing through Podcasting.
My reason for using Traditional characters is that, I believe, they are more universal, people from Mainland China can read them and people from Taiwan, HK and other Chinese abroad can also read them. If I use simplified characters, it will be only readable by Chinese from Mainland China. Another reason is that traditional characters are more authentic, they represent Chinese writing culture which has 5000 years. Simplified characters were adopted only after 1949 in order to eliminate illiteracy among Chinese population, because traditional characters are too complex to learn, they were simplified.
An update here. Now both simplified and traditional versions are available.
Hi,
Serge, thanks for the interesting podcasts. I use them myself and also recommend them to my students who are learning Chinese.
I noticed you decided to go ahead and update with both simplified and traditional characters. I think that is a great choice. You said above that traditional characters are more universal, but I would like to point out that it is untrue that most Mainland Chinese can read traditional characters. In fact, most people under the age of 60 could read many traditional characters!
Megan