Mandarin Mashup May 2, 2012
Northwestern begins preparation process for Chinese study abroad program
Ten Northwestern students will begin their preparation for a new summer study abroad program in China this Friday. The students will travel to China this summer to study sustainable energy as part of the Wanxiang Fellows Program.The program, created last year as part of President Barack Obama’s 100,000 Strong Initiative, will send students to Beijing for four weeks to take classes at Peking University before they transition to WanxiangPolytechnic College in Hangzhou, China for an “intensive immersion program,” said Karey Fuhs, assistant director of International Program Development at the NU Study Abroad Office. At Wanxiang, the students will work with local faculty on projects related to environmental sustainability, said Fuhs.“They’ll have the opportunity to learn about Chinese culture and the history of that region,” Fuhs said. “The primary focus is for students to learn about green technology and the green economy.”The students in the program will begin a preparatory class with Prof. Mark Petri on campus Friday and will meet three more times throughout May, Fuhs said.The Wanxiang Fellows Program was announced last August after the November 2009 creation of the national 100,000 Strong Initiative, which aims to build relations between the United States and China by encouraging more American students to study in China.Petri, who also serves as technology development director in the Energy Sciences and Engineering Directorate at Argonne National Laboratory, said the partnership works well because of China’s role in energy sustainability issues. China is the world’s largest carbon dioxide emitter, he said, but also produces the most solar and wind farms.“China is a growing consumer of oil and petroleum products, so they’re competing with the U.S. on the world market,” said Petri. “So we’re looking at what should the U.S. be thinking about in those areas in terms of mitigating the vulnerabilities in our energy usage.”Petri said he made a trip to China to meet with the faculty at Wanxiang in March and will travel with the students for three of the six weeks they are in China.Maddy Low, a Communication sophomore in the Wanxiang Fellows Program, said the program was the “perfect synthesis” of her interests in the environment and China.“I’m really hoping to take the environmental technology I learn about in China and bring that back to Evanston,” Low said.Petri said the ability to bring new ideas back to NU is central to the program. He said he hopes to have students present their projects in some sort of open forum in the fall.Fuhs said she expects the students to bring back a wide array of experiences and knowledge because of China’s position as a major player in world sustainability issues.“China in particular is an interesting place to study this given the population issues and climate degradation and the different solutions the Chinese government has come up with,” she said.The program will run from June 18 to July 29 and will include a Mandarin Chinese language course and classes on politics and public health in China in addition to the environmental sustainability component.- American Shows off His Chinese Speaking Talents - CRIENGLISH.com
Shots from the popular video depicting the 12 roles played by Mike Sui. [Photo: West China City Daily]
Mike Sui, an American man living in Beijing recently posted a short video of himself imitating different Chinese and English accents on Sina Weibo, the popular Chinese mircoblogging platform. The video quickly went viral, with over thousands of reposts and comments within hours, West China City Daily reports.
In the video clip, Sui plays 12 roles including a local Beijinger with a traditional Beijing accent, a Mandarin-speaker speaking broken English, a man with a Taiwan accent, somebody from Hong Kong, and various other characters from other countries with distinct accents.
Mike Sui has stated that he posted the video online because he had nowhere else to show off his Chinese speaking skills. American born Sui, whose father is from Beijing, said he didn't want to participate in contests for Chinese-speaking foreigners because he didn't consider himself a foreigner. - R0051734 3022 | good mozz studio has added a photo to the pool:
■ 20120430
■ 我撿到一篇作文
四月的最後一天，
神秘的，
我在買午餐的路上，
撿到一篇作文。
當然，
上面也是充滿了大量的腳印我才放心的撿的。
吸引我的，
就是那大器的標題「知識份子的風骨」
首先，
我活了25年，至今還沒有使用過"風骨"二字，
再來，
研判這篇作文的主人應該是一個高中生，或者大學準備轉學的考生，
文字結構滿完整的之外，
文章內容非常充實，也非常的有想法！
尤其四個大段，起承轉合相當明顯，
文中也引經據典，敘述能力強，非常棒！
獲得我與魯咪兒打下85高分！
不過，為何只有85，
因為他第一段寫的非常的棒，導致我們對於文章內容有太多的期待，
如果單就第一段給分，我會給98。
可惜，虎頭蛇尾。
就跟花了千把塊吃了有名餐廳的法式料理，
前菜非常美味，主餐還算可口，然後就不給我上餐後甜點。
而且字體也從一二三段的很工整，
到第四段的文字，根本一臉就是要趕快下課去逛一中一樣，
又潦草又亂撇的，你白癡啊！
>>>幽默問與答
www.facebook.com/mozz.fu/posts/3480638147758
黃玠 - 我的高中同學
youtu.be/_zSDQwKLYF8
Hong Kong--At the age of 10, Hong Kong student Miranda Lam can hold a conversation and write in both English and Mandarin Chinese. But ask her to speak to her grandmother and she shakes her head. “I don't know what she says sometimes,” she says.
Her grandmother speaks Cantonese, Hong Kong's official language. But Miranda's parents — both Cantonese speakers themselves — have chosen to limit the time they speak it at home. Instead, they talk to Miranda mainly in English and Mandarin, to improve her chances of attending an international school.
To linguists, Miranda's struggle to speak her mother tongue is a worrying indication of how Cantonese may be under threat in Hong Kong from the spread of Mandarin, the official language of mainland China. “It is difficult to calculate the timing but in the medium- to long-term, Cantonese is an endangered language” in Hong Kong, said Stephen Matthews, an associate professor in linguistics at the University of Hong Kong.
“It might survive for 50 years or so but after 50 years, it will still exist but it may well be on its way out.” Cantonese is the language of the streets, courts and the Legislative Council in the city of 7.1 million people. Although its written form shares the same roots as Mandarin, it differs in pronunciation and grammar which, according to linguists, makes it a distinct language rather than dialect.
Matthews, who has lived in Hong Kong for 20 years, believes the threat to Cantonese comes from current policies and changing attitudes towards Mandarin, also known as Putonghua, since the territory was handed back to China by Britain in 1997.
“Putonghua was pretty much invisible in the early 1990s,” he said. “Before the handover a number of friends and students would say 'I don't want to learn Putonghua. I'm not interested.'”
“But then around the time of the handover they said 'Maybe we should start learning Putonghua.' They were talking about it. Now, of course, everyone is doing it.” Matthews believes one significant factor is that schools have begun switching from Cantonese to Mandarin for the teaching of Chinese literacy, a move that improves students' Mandarin but which appears to have a detrimental effect on their Cantonese.
More than 160 primary schools are currently using Mandarin in Chinese language lessons after a government policy encouraging a switch from Cantonese was introduced in 2003. Then there are the students like Miranda who are sent to international schools. “Their Cantonese is suffering. It is undergoing attrition,” said Matthews, using a technical term for the process by which people lose their native language.
Another factor influencing the shift is the rising flow of mainland visitors, whose numbers have soared since cross-border travel was made easier in recent years. In response, shops, restaurants and hotels are increasing their use of Mandarin.
The move has angered some and earlier this month a group staged a demonstration outside clothing chain Giordano after it began using the simplified Chinese characters used in mainland China, rather than the traditional characters understood by Cantonese speakers.
Thomas Lee, professor of linguistics at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, is less pessimistic and believes Cantonese is “still very much alive.” But he warned it needed to remain in use in mainstream education to avoid becoming marginalized, pointing to the decline of Shanghainese — now reckoned to be spoken by less than 50 percent of people in China's second city — as an example of how dialects and languages can decline in a matter of generations.
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