Monday, February 1, 2016

Chinese 汉语拼音音调符号 Grammar


Her pencil broke four times.... pardon the handwriting.

Half marks taken for writing 'f ' the mirrored way. Such a unrelated error, cannot give chance meh?


 This one (above) is from enrichment class. 



See word #3 ju qi -- isn't ju supposedly is in second tone?  举起 ju (2) qi (3)- raise

I thought there was an error in print, so I asked a fellow Mama. 
She says that when two words with 3rd tone come together, the first word will be switched to 2nd tone. (That's like Ping Ying 音调 grammar?)  So I asked, if that's the case, shouldn't we write the tone in 2nd tone since we pronounce it that way and precisely the 音调符号's main purpose is to help us pronounce. She says no, we will still have to write the original 3rd tone because the word itself is in 3rd tone. In this case even though we read it in 2nd tone, we still will have to write in 3rd hence the print is correct. 

Wa...... win liao lor.   
I will surely confuse Kiki with Ping Ying Grammar if that's the case. 
音调 is to help us pronounce correctly. we write both in 3rd tones and then read them otherwise, surely at this point in time Kiki will be confused because I'm telling her the rules changes. Had the kids had more foundation, then they will be able to distinguish an exception. So now not only have they not caught foothold of the foundation, they have to know there are exceptions. Well, let's hope exceptions remain scarce and we'll gain momentum with learning the basics.


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