22 June 2023
Without leaving school, Year 7 students spent ‘A week in China’ from Monday 16 June, with a lesson each day abut the fundamental basics of Chinese language and culture, as Poppy explains.
Poppy F, Year 7
The opportunity to begin to learn such a widely spoken language was a privilege. As one of the hardest languages in the world, it was not easy. However, we all soon learnt to say “hello” (nǐ hǎo) and then moved on to things like numbers, birthdays and travel. For part of the time we joined live lessons with teachers, which was really helpful. It was also fun to discover how to say and write our Chinese names.
I’m sure that, like me, everyone found the lessons enjoyable and entertaining. My friend Paloma said: “I love that we had live lessons. This helped us get the accents and pronunciation correct, which are so different to English, the first language for most of our class.”
We were lucky that each group included a classmate fluent in Manderin, who could help us if we were struggling with the tasks.
Before this week I would have thought it impossible to even try to learn Chinese, but now I know how to greet others and have a wide range of vocabulary that I’m sure will be very useful.