Lesson 121: Complete
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Kirin: Shàngwǎng xué Zhōngwén dì yībǎi èr shí yī kè .
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?
Kirin: Kèchéng .
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
Kirin: Kèchéng .
Adam: means “course.” But this isn’t any normal course we have here, is it?
Kirin: Bú shì, shì yíge gèng jìn yí bù de kèchéng .
Adam: So let’s look at what she just said. There’s the character gèng , which we’ve seen before in
Adam: which means “better.” The gèng 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 Jìn means “to enter” or “advance.” That’s followed by
Adam: which means “one step.” So together
Kirin: Gèng jìn yí bù de kèchéng .
Adam: literally means “to progress one step at a time course,” in other words “a progressive course.”
Kirin: Gèng jìn yí bù de kèchéng .
Adam: So knowing this, we can now change the intro to our lesson to:
Kirin: Huānyíng láidào wǒmen gèng jìn yí bù de zhōngwén xuéxí kèchéng .
Adam: So that literally translates to “Welcome arrive we progressive Chinese study course.”
Kirin: Huānyíng láidào wǒmen gèng jìn yí bù de zhōngwén xuéxí kèchéng .
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: Jí .
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
Kirin: Dāncí .
Adam: while in our most recent lessons we’ve been using
Kirin: Dānzì .
Adam: Similarly, there is a term used to describe a “new word” which is
Kirin: Shēngcí
Adam: or
Kirin: Shēngzì .
Adam: So Kirin, what can you tell us about the shēngzì in our course?
Kirin: Wǒmen zài dì yī èr jí yǐjīng jiāo le hěnduō shēngzì .
Adam: Yes, that’s right. Let’s look at some examples of some of the shēngzì we have taught you in the past. First though, let’s look at how we say “example.”
Kirin: Bǐrú .
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 shēngzì we have taught you.
Kirin: Guójiā .
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.”
Kirin: Guójiā .
Adam: So what can you tell us about the guójiā we have taught here?
Kirin: Wǒmen yǐjīng jiāo nǐmen hěnduō guójiā de míngzi . Bǐrú shuō Táiwān ,Měiguó ,Rìběn ,Jiānádà ,Àozhōu děng děng .
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.
Kirin: Nà bú shì guójiā . Shì etcetera de yìsi .
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.
Kirin: Hái yǒu, wǒmen yě jiāo le nǐmen bù yíyàng de shíwù .
Adam: So there’s another shēngzì for us.
Kirin: Shíwù . Shì shípǐn de shí gēn dòngwù de wù .
Adam: So that’s the character from “food products” and “animal”, which together forms the word for “food” in general.
Kirin: Duì ,wǒmen yě jiāo le nǐmen hěnduō shíwù de míngzi . Bǐrú shuō hànbǎo ,shǔtiáo ,chǎo miàn ,mǐ fàn ,tāng děng děng .
Adam: For the entire list, premium subscribers can access the word bank, and type in “food” under the “type” field.
Kirin: Wǒmen yě jiāo le nǐmen hěnduō yǐnliào de míngzi . Bǐrú shuō kāfēi ,chá ,kělè ,píjiǔ děng děng .
Adam: To see that list, type in “drink” in the “type” category of the Word Bank.
Kirin: Wǒmen hái jiāo le nǐmen yìxiē dìfāng de míngzi . Bǐrú shuō chá guǎn ,gōngyuán ,dòngwùyuán děng děng .
Adam: And as you might guess, you can find that list by typing “place” in the word bank “type” field. So hopefully that helped you out a little by learning a few extra words that can be used in the teaching portion of this course. For more review tools, visit ChineseLearnOnline.com.
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