Keeping My Mandarin Alive

Keeping My Mandarin Alive
World Scientific | 2005 | ISBN : 9812564020 | PDF | 10 MB

Learn Mandarin while you brush your teeth or shave? Read how Singapore's Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew does it! A Prime Minister as an interpreter? Find out when and why MM Lee had to do it. For the first time, this towering figure of the island-state's politics gives a first-hand account of How he has learnt Mandarin over the last 50 years and kept it alive. He also tells When and Why he decided to learn the language, Where he got hold of the learning materials from, Whom he practises his Mandarin with and What spurs him on.

MM Lee goes beyond these 5Ws and 1H in Keeping My Mandarin Alive, to share the agony of a late Chinese language learner and how he has overcome the difficulties - he strove to learn Mandarin only at age 32 (from 1955) and Hokkien at age 38 (from 1961). The comprehensive package also details how the English-educated MM Lee has been relating Mandarin to his master language in an effort to grasp the former and unravels how the latest technology has helped him in his quest.

Summary: Reference for Chinese Teacher of the Western World
Rating: 2

There are many foreigners learning Chinese nowadays, including the English speaking people in the US or Europe. This book provides some tips in learning Chinese for the English native speaker, mainly on listening and speaking. For writing, you'd better look for other books on the topic. For Chinese Teacher in the West, you could know what problems English speaker may encounter and how they deal with it. You may think of some solution out of this which should be useful in your future teaching. Since Lee Kuan Yew is also a Chinese and have been exposed to Chinese environment in Singapore, his learning experience may be somehow different from those English speaker in the West, especially the kids. You may take a look however.

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