Eating Out

This weeks chinese lesson dealt with eating out (in a Restaurant). A good lesson that should be very useful! It looks like there will be a follow-on lesson in the New Year, as they has been some interest from the Tuesday night class!

Have now listened to the OlyPicks sessions from ChinesePod.com. The 'Newbie' session 'The Olympics' was good, but I found the 'Elementary' lessons 'The Opening Ceremony' and 'The Olympic Marathon' to be heavy going for a beginner like me. The lessons are not very self contained and therefore require that the user has completed previous lessons to fully understand. The transcripts would probably help but you have to subscribe to get them. The basic subscription is $9 a month (less if you sign up to for six months or more). Think that I'll be leaving it for a while though!

The chinese-tools.com website, mentioned in the comments to my last post, looks very interesting, but as I was looking to for audio to listen to in the car, I doesn't meet my needs. Would be good for somebody else though!

Learning the Chinese language

On 26th September 2006, I started a ten week course with Oxfordshire Adult Learning. The short beginners course has proved to be very interesting and entertaining. Currently there are two weeks remaining of the course, but a follow-on course is scheduled for January 2007.

Additionally, I have been using my car journey, to work, to listen to chinese language lessons that I have downloaded from the Internet. The main course that I have been listening to is the Chinese Learn Online podcast which I download and transfer to CD. These lessons are generally around nine to twelve minutes in length, but I find that you need to listen to them several times. There is a new one every two days and as of today there are 35 different lessons available. Initially, basic lesson notes were available, but these have now stopped.

I have recently discovered another podcast from chinesepod.com that releases a new lesson every day and already has 430 lessons available! I've downloaded a few to try, including all three from the Olympic section.

Introduction

When did we decide that we wanted to go to Beijing for the 2008 Olympics?
It first crossed our mind on 29th August 2004, when we were at the Athens 2004 Closing Ceremony and saw the Olympic flag being passed across to the Mayor of Beijing.

However, on our return home, we realised what an undertaking it would be and had (probably) decide to give these games a miss. That changed on 6th July 2005, when London secured the rights to host the 2012 Olympic Games.