Chinese 431 Advanced Conversation
Due 4/4/06 (Tuesday)
For this assignment, there are two parts.
The tedious but necessary pronunciation drills is the first part. I used to have this as the first assignment. But it is probably good that we do it now instead, since both you and me know what you need to work on. There are no tonal drills, but you can use Njstar’s pinyin conversion function to add tone marks and pinyin. Try to use the sound files online as model pronunciation:
http://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/dept/chinese/conversation/dialectdrillwithsound.doc
The grading for this part will depend on how much improvement you make in your problem area.
The second part is to watch the flash movie at http://unix.rulez.org/~calver/funny/swf/europe-italy.swf and figure out ways to describe the differences as portrayed in the movie as accurately and succinctly as possible. Some may require one or two sentences. Others may require longer explanation. Try not to write down English first and then translate the English to Chinese. It is very easy to fall into the traps of English grammar. Note: this movie is not supposed to be politically correct; so take it as you would take cartoons.
We will have an opportunity in class to get feedback before you do the taping. Since everyone will be doing the same thing, we won’t have everyone present the whole thing. You should be prepared to do parts of the task in class.