Learning Pinyin - 拼音

Listened to more Chinese lessons today. I am starting to understand more, but it is really going very slowly. Chinese is so different to any other language that I have known or studied. I am still taking teeny, tiny baby steps.

I did have a bump in the road. When I synced up my I-pod, all of my language content vanished. I am now going through the tedious process of getting all the content again, and re-installing it on my device again.

In the meantime, I decided to get my listen in with some basic YouTube videos. NinHaoChina produces many Chinese tutorial videos. Unfortunately  it appears they are not uploading any new Chinese language material. (understandable, languages change at a glacial pace) Embedded below is a video I watched this morning. The video is about Pinyin, a very basic system to learn the four Chinese tones.

When you fall off language learning?

Unfortunately it happens to the best of us. Sometimes we go into our new language full throttle, then just get burnt out. One of my favorite language lovers of all time is Moses. I thought his Question of the Week was something that we should answer, or at least analyse in this blog post.

I think one of the answers to this problem, is to remind ourselves why we started learning the language in the first place.

quốc ngữ việt nam

Did you know that the Vietnamese alphabet is based on the Portuguese alphabet? It is true.


Chữ Quốc ngữ, còn được gọi tắt là Quốc ngữ, là hệ thống chữ viết chính thức hiện nay của tiếng Việt. Hệ thống này được xây dựng dựa trên chữ cái Latinh(cụ thể là trực tiếp từ chữ cái Bồ Đào Nha) thêm các chữ ghép và 9 dấu phụ — 4 dấu tạo ra các âm mới, và năm dấu còn lại dành cho thể hiện thanh điệu của từ. Hai loại dấu phụ có thể được viết cùng trên một chữ cái nguyên âm.

Bảng chữ cái

Bảng chữ cái tiếng Việt có 29 chữ cái, theo thứ tự:

Are some languages spoke faster than others?

A common complaint among students taking a foreign language, is that the professor speaks too fast.  It is almost a universal complaint. Many students feel like there is an avalanche of speech coming their way.

But - is the foreign speaker really speaking faster than normal?

No* - they are not speaking faster. This essay will explain the in's and out's as to why we think foreigners are speaking faster.

Arabic Alphabet in Photos, الأبجدية

人称代词 - Personal Pronouns in Simplified Chinese

Bambara: A Niger-Congo language

As many of you know, France and West African countries have decided to invade Mali and push out Islamic militants responsible for the coup d’ état. Now is a good enough time to discuss Bambara, one of the largest indigenous languages of Mali.

As Mali was once a French colony, the official language of Mali is French. However about eighty percent of the population, 13 million people, speak Bambara.

The Bambara language is the mother tongue of the Bambara ethnic group, numbering about 2,700,000 people, but serves also as a lingua franca in Mali (it is estimated that about 80% of the population speaks it as a first or second language).

Linguistic Classification

Bambara is a Niger-Congo language. It is closely related to the languages Jula and Marka. Bambara belongs to a group of closely-related languages called Manding, within the larger Mandé group.

Bomara is an SOV language. This means: subject, object, verb usually appear in that order. If English were SOV, then "Sam oranges ate" would be an ordinary sentence, as opposed to the actual Standard English "Sam ate oranges".