This year for our Lunar New Year project we performed a set of tai chi moves for all the families  of Mandarin students. This was a new experience because we really got to be part of the culture. From my past experience I find that if you want to learn a language it helps to be part of the culture. To perform this we had to memorize all the moves and then sync that information to the music that was playing. My favorite tai chi move was the move where we would slide from one side to another: the reason I liked this was because it felt very graceful. Click Here To See Photos.

Another project that we worked on this year was our description project. In this project we had to choose someone from the LREI community and describe them in Mandarin using the describing words that we had been learning for the three to four weeks prior. The only notes that we were allowed to have with us were the sentences, but even they were entirely written in characters and we could not have any pinyin. one word that I really like is “Juǎn fǎ” Characters: 卷发. I like it because it looks like it sounds. Sorry I don’t have any photos. 🙁

Some other things that we have done this year were: we learned the words for different countries, we learned the words for different colors, we learned about words to use in class (some phrases too), and many other words and phrases! We have started this quarter with a unit on food words which I have been looking forward to for a while.