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This is my playground for poetry written for children with ideas and inspiration for writing your own poems. Come on in. Sit for a spell, have a cup of words to swirl around and make your own cup of poetry. I'm so glad you are here. I hope you'll find the Kingdom of Poetry a fun place to be.

Thursday, January 15, 2015

January 10, 2015

Drinking real China tea
from little porcelain cups
learning Mandarin

     When I visit foreign countries I like to pick up a few of the words in the language of that country.  When I visited Kenya, I was quite pleased with my ability to pick up Swahili and all the Kenyans were very helpful with supplying new words for me.  Not so in China.  For some reason I had a terrible time getting my tongue around their vowels.  And if I'd try a word in Chinese, the person I would be talking to would immediately respond in English. For some reason I had a much harder time with Chinese.  Maybe it was all those vowel combinations having a different sound, or perhaps the x sounding like an s, or the z sounding like ds.  But the zh sounds like dge as in hedge.  See what I mean?  Next time I go to China, I'm going to invest in a language program before I go.  So all I learned was xiexie for thank you and nihao for hello.  I think Disney needs to do a movie about a Chinese animated character using lots of Chinese words, maybe that way I'd learn more words.  Hey, it worked for my learning African words. Jumbo, akumba metata.

2 comments:

  1. Joy, I liked the use of real China tea. The local libraries here have access to some foreign language studies. You might want to see what you can learn at home on the computer for free.

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    1. Thanks for the suggestion, Linda. I'll check with my library. They are really good with that sort of thing and run a lot of English classes in their meeting room. The diversity at my local library is something wonderfully special.

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