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Adam: Hello, and welcome to the first lesson for level 3 of our course. I’m your host, Adam, along with Kirin.
In today’s lesson we will try and describe our course, using Chinese. This is important since, as you may have noticed in recent lessons, we have been moving towards using more Chinese to explain the content of new lessons.
So to begin with, how would you say “course” in Chinese?
Adam: This is made up of two characters. The first, we’ve seen before, means “class” while the second refers to “journey” or “procedure” so together
Adam: means “course.” But this isn’t any normal course we have here, is it?
Adam: So let’s look at what she just said. There’s the character 更, which we’ve seen before in
Adam: which means “better.” The 更 on its own refers to “change” and here it combines with another term.
Adam: The first character we’ve also seen before. We in fact saw it way back in lesson 16 in the term.
Adam: which means “Please enter.” The 进 means “to enter” or “advance.” That’s followed by
Adam: which means “one step.” So together
Adam: literally means “to progress one step at a time course,” in other words “a progressive course.”
Adam: So knowing this, we can now change the intro to our lesson to:
Adam: So that literally translates to “Welcome arrive we progressive Chinese study course.”
Adam: which means I can now retire my previous intro of “Welcome to our progressive course teaching Chinese.” (sigh) Alright, so what can you tell us about this course, Kirin?
Adam: Ah yes. Right now there are three
Kirin: 级.
Adam: And that means “level.” What else can you tell us?
Adam: So can you figure out what she said there? “One level has 60 lessons.”
Adam: Now in most lessons, we try to teach you some new vocabulary items. Previously, we taught you the term used for “word.” There are two similar terms we’ve been using. Our friends in Mainland China used the word
Adam: while in our most recent lessons we’ve been using
Adam: Similarly, there is a term used to describe a “new word” which is
Adam: or
Adam: So Kirin, what can you tell us about the 生字 in our course?
Adam: Yes, that’s right. Let’s look at some examples of some of the 生字 we have taught you in the past. First though, let’s look at how we say “example.”
Adam: So to say “for example” we could say
Adam: which means she’s going to tell us some examples. Now before we do that, let’s look at a few categories of 生字 we have taught you.
Adam: Ah, can you figure out what that is? It’s made up of two characters we’ve seen before. The first refers to “country,” but you may remember that on its own, concepts are usually described using two characters, so here there is a second character added, which in this case refers to “home.” And when you put the two together you get the word meaning “country.”
Adam: So what can you tell us about the 国家 we have taught here?
Kirin: 我们已经教你们很多国家的名字. 比如说 台湾，美国，日本，加拿大，澳洲 等等.
Adam: Great, you can… sorry what did you say at the end there?
Adam: I’m sorry what country is that? I don’t have that on my list.
Adam: Ah, I knew that （ahem）. The literal meaning is “wait wait” but it’s commonly used in this context to mean “etc.” You can find the whole list of countries and more in lesson 3.
Adam: So there’s another 生字 for us.
Adam: So that’s the character from “food products” and “animal”, which together forms the word for “food” in general.
Kirin: 对，我们也教了你们很多食物的名字. 比如说 汉堡，薯条，炒面，米饭，汤 等等.
Adam: For the entire list, premium subscribers can access the word bank, and type in “food” under the “type” field.
Kirin: 我们也教了你们很多饮料的名字. 比如说 咖啡，茶，可乐，啤酒 等等.
Adam: To see that list, type in “drink” in the “type” category of the Word Bank.
Kirin: 我们还教了你们一些地方的名字. 比如说 茶馆，公园，动物园 等等.
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