laifrances News

Frances Lai

Welcome to Mandarin classes at De Anza College! I am Frances Lai, instructor of elementary and intermediate Mandarin. I have been teaching at De Anza since 2001. I will be teaching Mandarin 2 and Mandarin 4 this winter quarter, 2007. Information about these courses can be found under "Courses" in the left column.

Frances Lai

Contact Info
E-mail: mandarinlaoshi@yahoo.com
Office hours this quarter
Thursday, 10:30 am-11:20 at Learning Center (at Discussion Room in the Library on campus)

To my surprise, Xinjiang, China is not all desert. This is Sand Lake near Kashgar.

Frances Lai

Mandarin Learning Resources
General:

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Chinese_%28Mandarin%29: Wikipedia has an award-winning (Oct. 2005)"textbook" for learning Chinese. The site has lessons and appendices.

http://www.chinesepod.com: A free podcast (mp3 download) of a 20 minute conversation lesson is available each day (you can subscribe in iTunes). Lots of levels: newbie, beginner, intermediate, advanced, popular words. Content is fresh and interesting, covering subjects such as inviting someone to a meal, buying a car, and inquiring about living conditions in different parts of China. Signing up for premium ($) gets you dialogue transcripts and review exercises.

http://www.pinyin.info: A guide to different forms of Hanyu romanization, including rules, articles of interest (re: usages in Taiwan and Mainland China), and other related readings

http://www.chinese-forums.com: An active forum of learners (many in Taiwan and China).

Frances Lai

Dictionaries/Translation:

http://www.zhongwen.com: Dictionary, Information about Chinese characters and culture. Useful for searching by radical for a Chinese word that you do not recognize.

http://www.xuezhongwen.net/chindict/chindict.php: A fairly comprehensive dictionary, which accepts pinyin. Just type in the English word "good" or the number "three" and see what varied results you get!

http://babelfish.altavista.com/: A translation website. Good for phrases and words, but sentence structure and grammar gets lost in translation.

http://tw.dictionary.yahoo.com/. This is another one my daughter likes. It's traditional-character based.

Frances Lai

Other:

http://www.eatingchina.com: Eating China is about the food of China and Taiwan. Here you will find a (slowly) growing collection of info based on Stephen Jack's reading and experiences, mainly in Taiwan, and occasionally in China.