A week or so ago, I sat in on Kelly’s Chinese build class. Although it was technically a beginning class , the two students that attended had some knowledge of Chinese. The topic of focus was food and drinks in Chinese, in particular types of food and the type of language that might come up in a restaurant setting.

The lesson revolved around a handout that had Chinese characters written on it with blank spaces to write in the pronunciation and the English definition. The two students usually knew how to pronounce the characters, but some of them had trouble remembering what each of them meant. Kelly usually had them try to remember or give them help breaking down what they already know. For instance, one character meant “meat” so after that it was a matter of seeing what the other character meant in order to get the meaning of the word (“chicken” “beef” “fish”).

Then she would write both the character itself and the phonetic pronunciation on the board, including the proper intonation. We would then say the word out loud, emphasizing the tone of the word, which is easily the toughest thing for native English speakers to learn about Chinese.

We worked our way down the list and kept going back to other words and repeating them to keep them fresh in our memory. It was a casual lesson, meant to spark interest in learning Chinese and maybe get a base understanding of how characters and tones work.