Category Archives: Chinese

新年快乐 (happy new year!)

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Xin Nian Kuai Le Happy year of the dragon y’all! The moon is setting on Gene’s year (rabbit) and rising on Rachel’s (dragon). All in all this last year’s been a great one for me, so I hope this one will be just as great for my wife.

We held our 11th annual Anderkoo make-your-own-dumpling party last weekend so as not to step on any “real” Chinese New Year celebrations. Far off our record high of 1K+ dumplings, we still made and served up shy of 400 this year. As always, we made way too much stuffing for the event. It’s feeling like the week after Thanksgiving, except with pork instead of turkey.

Jacob experienced his first lion and ribbon dances on Sunday in Rockville, MD – as always, he thoroughly enjoyed (read: stared intently at) the festivities.

For anyone who’s looking for an explanation of the Chinese zodiac, I recommend checking out this book reviewed at Hapa Mama. The story as I recall it really illustrates Chinese culture’s respect for brains over brawn. (And, just to get a jump on next year’s snake, which to Western ears sounds sinister, Chinese culture has traditionally revered the snake as the ancestor of the human race.)

Happy New Year! (or, more traditionally, 恭禧发财, or “May you prosper!”)

More Mandarin classes in public schools

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Chinese-language instruction is becoming more popular in urban schools across the country where educators hope to offer a global perspective to students in low-income areas and students who sti may be learning English. In Boston, Mandarin classes are seen as a way for students to compete with peers outside the district, who may have greater access to such courses. “We want to expand their life experiences outside of Boston, and one way to do it is for them to study international cultures,” said Yu-Lan Lin, director of the city schools’ world-language program.

http://articles.boston.com/2011-07-04/news/29736698_1_urban-schools-language-program-chinese-language

CD Review: Chinese Lullabies

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Parents suffering from sleepless babies will pay anything for relief, and retailers make fortunes off pseudo-scientific quackery. Chinese Lullabies is the real deal: music that really can help a baby go to sleep. Or, at least, our little Jacob.

I’ll admit this CD won’t teach either you or your child much Chinese, except maybe “mā ma” (mother) and “bǎo bao” (precious one). It’s hard to glean Chinese out of singing, where tones are distorted; the Chinese in these songs are formally poetic (that is, not everyday language), and I find children’s voices (with lots of echo) hard to discern. Maybe if you really know your Chinese, you’ll do better than I.

What recommends this CD is the music, which is decidedly Chinese and not some Chinese translation of “Rock-a-bye-baby.” It’s uniformly soothing and peaceful – what you’d want from a lullaby album. The instrumentation seems to be a mix of authentic instruments and synthesizers, but it actually works. (I’ve got some other Chinese children’s CDs whose over-the-top synthetic sounds definitely do NOT work).

Jacob’s gone to sleep to this music for nearly nine months now – he doesn’t really need it anymore, so we occasionally skip it. We can’t really prove that this music soothes him because it’s good or because he’s so familiar with it after hearing it for most of his life, but really – isn’t the point of these lullaby CDs really to soothe the parents after a long day? I say yes. Buy this CD today.