Wednesday, October 22, 2008

A Little Bit of Mandarin

My name is.....

A Short dialog

She has been working on a family tree and learning each members' Chinese name. These will be written without accents so if you read pinyin you won't get the full affect but for those of us who don't you get a small glimpse of what the words look like. I will try and figure out how to write in Chinese Characters and Pinyin on here.

Mom- mama, Dad- baba, Princess Flower- wo (I) or zhu li (her name), Butterfly- Kai li, Ladybug- Ai li, Dragonfly- Rui li, Aunt KK- Kai a yi (a yi means aunt), Aunt Becca- Bei a yi, Papa- Wai fu, Grammy- Wai mu, Uncle Dan- Dan shushu (shushu- younger brother of father), Uncle Matt- Mai hobo (not pronounced like the English hobo nor does it mean this...means older brother of the father), Aunt Jenny- Jin a yi, Moro- Muo li, Dabba do- A bi, Aunt KiKi- (working on the first part) a yi, Grandpa and Papa Buddy- yeye, and Granny T- nainai.

As far as her uncle Zach and Richard, and 3 other cousins....she is still working on them. Her three cousins are a bit of a challenge because they each have R's in the middle of their names which the Chinese language does not support. So these names will be post and added to her family tree next week.

One thing I didn't know before Princess Flower started the family tree was that I have followed a Chinese tradition of naming each generation with the same ending sound. The ending to each one of my girls name (li) means beautiful....how cool is that! So I have Beautiful Pearl, Beautiful Open, Beautiful Love, and Beautiful Lucky if you translate their Chinese names into English.

I also requested that Princess Flower translate their blogging names into Chinese for me. This was easy as they are actual words in Mandarin.

Flower-hua

Butterfly- hu die

Ladybug- piao chong

Dragonfly- qing ting

Princess Flower is still meeting at least once a week with our neighbor for Chinese lessons. They go beyond just learning the language, she is also learning culture. She eats lunch (dumplings her favorite) with chopsticks, Chinese calligraphy (she uses awesome paper that she writes with water and it looks like ink. In a few minutes the water dries and what she just wrote disappears), and much more that I can't remember right now.

2 comments:

Dana said...

Does your friend charge you anything for the lessons? I would love to know what kind of schedule PF has each day. ie. Does she do spelling, reading, and math everyday?
I totally thought of you when I was making James' lunch today we had English muffin pizzas, borccoli with cheese, and apples slices.
Are your kids in CHAP?

Life throws you surprises! said...

My kids are not in CHAP. It became to hard with my younger ones. My neighbor does not charge for these lessons. She usually tests out things she has planned for the public school classes she teaches on occassion. I did pay for PF to take a two week chinese camp this past summer. I posted her schedule. Sounds like a good lunch.