Students from Granby Memorial High School - Chinese Language ...

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Students from Granby Memorial High School (continued) aspects of the Chinese culture. For example, my class put on a fashion show modeling Chinese clothes representing different positions in ancient Chinese history. Another fun part of the afternoon was the red envelopes! Red envelopes symbolize good luck and are meant to ward off evil spirits. Each of us were fortunate enough to receive one! The rest of the day was enlightening, fun, and full of culture. I am glad that I had the opportunity to partake in this Chinese New Year Celebration and I hope that I can continue learning and experiencing Chinese traditions. I learned a lot and so did my family! Chinese New Year Celebration by Marieta Jedamanova The Chinese New Year is the most important holiday in the Chinese Lunar Calendar. It lasts for fifteen days and every day there is a special activity, including worshiping the gods and families reuniting. Every year is named after a different animal. There are twelve animals in total: The rat, ox, tiger, rabbit, dragon, snake, horse, sheep, monkey, rooster, dog, and pig. 2010 is the year of the tiger. At the Chinese New Year celebration at Trinity College, we celebrated the year of the tiger by performing many different Chinese cultural activities. Some include the Lion Dance and the famous Chinese Ribbon Dance. The celebration at Trinity College was a great learning experience for me. Our presentation taught me about the ancient Chinese culture and the costumes that were worn by the Emperor and Empress of the Han Dynasty. I also learned about the Lion Dance in which people dress up in lion costumes and one person controls the back of the lion while another person controls the front. While dancing, they imitate a lion’s movements. The Ribbon Dance was also very interesting. In Chinese ribbon dancing, many dancers use long colorful ribbons to portray different movements of wind and water. All of the dances at Trinity were elegant and beautiful and they were full of rich cultural history. Because I enjoyed this year’s Chinese New Year celebration at Trinity College, I hope to go again next year. The performances were all fun to watch and the Chinese food at the end of the celebration was also very good. It was also exciting to do our Chinese fashion show and perform on stage in front of everyone. I hope that our performance was also informational for everyone in the audience. It was a good learning experience as well as a fun activity which I hope to go back to over the years. Chinese New Year Celebration Response by Wesley Lata At the Chinese Celebration there were many people, and a lot of culture all bound to one room. In that single room held festivities I have never seen before, Including the Tiger Dance, Singing, and even tongue twisters. I saw people I knew; I even got to see my last year’s Chinese teacher Kao Lao Shi, along with some new people. What I enjoyed the most of the Chinese New Year celebration was the positive attitude given by all the people. My father had met up with an old friend while at the celebration. I was stunned at the fact that everyone was given a whole lot of respect, and then those giving the equivalent back to that person, and the next. I thought that the Chinese New Year Celebration was a lot of fun, because there was a lot of enthusiasm put into it. (continued on page 11) 10 Sundays June 2010
Students from Granby Memorial High School (continued) In conclusion my over all favorite aspect of the Chinese New Year Celebration, was the enthusiasm and the effort. The Effort was the most obvious part of the whole event, a lot of time was put into such an event therefore it deserves reconigition. The enthusiasm was the best a lot of laughter caught my attention and how it brought people together. Over all I thought the Celebration is definitely something to look forward to. Thank you Su Lao Shi My Chinese learning experience by Andrew Carroll A little less than two years ago, I signed up to take Mandarin Chinese I in my Freshman year of high school. I did not expect to actually be able to take the class as a ninth-grade student, due to its immense popularity. However, to my pleasant surprise, the schedule I received at the end of eighth-grade revealed that I had, indeed, been selected to participate in what would become the first Chinese course ever to be taught at Granby Memorial High School. When the first day of my Freshman year came, I found myself in a classroom normally intended for geometry classes. Around me were, perhaps, two dozen other students that had chosen to study the most widely spoken language in the world. As we waded through the first lessons, many of us found our interest in the language greatly increased. Others, unfortunately, lost interest altogether, and dropped out of the class. It became apparent as the first semester sped by that the majority of people that took the class only did so on a whim. Few, it seemed, actually desired to speak or write Chinese. When the last of those for whom the Chinese language was uninteresting left the class, our number had decreased to about 15 students. However, the quick-paced nature of the class did not only discourage those that took it on a whim: on the contrary, it proved greatly beneficial to those genuinely interested in the subject. Within a single year of learning the language, the remaining students learned the equivalent of what might be taught in two years in a French or Spanish course. Little more can be said of the first year of Mandarin Chinese at GMHS than this: it was a huge success. A number of students, including myself, opted to continue to Chinese II, but unfortunately, there were too few applicants from the middle school to offer Chinese I again. My personal experience with learning the language has been plagued with difficulty. My effort, both last year and this year, has been inconsistent in the class; accordingly, my understanding of the language is significantly less than that of my peers. However, I have continued my attempts to learn Mandarin Chinese for one reason: I love the language. Despite an endless number of idiosyncrasies and quirks in Chinese that I simply cannot understand, I find the tongue wonderfully simplistic, in speech and in writing. A lot of the grammatical concepts do not make sense to me, but so many of them do that simply following the structure of phrases is opium to my mind. Perhaps the single most difficult part of Chinese, for me, is learning to connect sounds to characters. Every other language I have studied thus far has had phonetic elements - not so for Mandarin. That individual syllables can have a (continued on page 12) 11 Sundays June 2010
Page 1 and 2: A Place of Possibilities June 2010
Page 3 and 4: Principal’s Word (continued) “
Page 5 and 6: Awards ACS Annual Chinese Culture P
Page 7 and 8: Students from Granby Memorial High
Page 9: Students from Granby Memorial High
Page 13 and 14: 2010 CLS Youth Summer Camp Date: Au
Page 15 and 16: Defining the CLS Experience It was

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