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Published: June 26th 2006
Today was our first day of class! I didn't do much in the morning, but catch up on reading that I haven't been able to do the past three years. Then in the afternoon we had three hours of intense language class. We learned how to ask and answer such phrases as "How do you do?" and "How is your health?". Our teacher also went through the Mandarin pronouns, phonetics, and numbers. The most difficult part was learning the tones. At this point I felt as if we were all taking voice lessons. The teacher would "sing" the sounds to us, then we would "sing" what we heard back. However what we would "sing" back never seemed to be correct, even if we couldn't tell the difference between what she said and we said. It is a very interesting language to learn though. I knew it was a tonal language, but I didn't know the four tones of which the language is made. Each tone is signified by a symbol over the letter to which you apply the tone. One tone is just a solid pitch (not changing), another starting low then raising in pitch, the third goes from a high pitch to a low pitch back to a high one, and the final tone is going from a high pitch to a low pitch. I think the language must have been invented by a singer!
After all that hard work of trying to differentiate pitches, we went to a restaurant down the street and had another family style meal with six different dishes (a couple of tofu dishes, an egg soup, an eggplant dish, kabobs, and a potato and meat dish). Then Diana and I went to try more of the unique Chinese ice cream flavors. Tonight I had the corn ice cream, it was really good. It smelled like corn and was shaped like an ear of corn. It was on a stick with a crust on the outside which tasted like an ice cream cone and was carved to look like the kernels on the ear. The ice cream inside the crust was sweet and vaguely tasted like corn. I was impressed.
I also tried the leechee fruit and liked it. The outside of the fruit looks prickly and not like something edible. But you peel off this thick skin and inside the meat is much like the meat of a grape. The first one I ate, I didn't know it had a big seed inside which doesn't taste the greatest (like seeds inside real grapes, not the seedless kind) but I took the seed out before eating the rest and thoroughly enjoyed the fruit!
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Carla
non-member comment
Yuck! again!
Now that you've described the corn ice cream, I'm picturing the pea ice cream! Disgusting! I'm with Aunt Bev. Rum raisin for me, too! The language sounds interesting. listening to it on TV, I wouldn't have ever thought of it as a "singing" language! Interesting. When you come home, you and Bobby can have a sing off! Harry's still on! Down to 9 people! (Including Gina, the other previous winner.)