Elaine
Being a Malaysian Chinese and not being able to at least speak Chinese was a great disadvantage and to some extent, an embarrassment. I used to be shy at speaking out in Chinese (at least more so than now), afraid of being embarrassed. However, I am really happy that I've finally overcome that personal barrier and have the courage to take up Chinese 1.
I have enjoyed myself tremendously throughout the course, especially with such dedicated lecturers and tutors! Xiexie Li laoshi and Ms Gong Hang! The project was certainly the highlight as it allowed us to explore our creative boundaries and learn new skills at the same time. Making the video was especially fun and of course, there is the not-so-fun part of ensuring that our pronunciation, grammar, and words are correct especially when we had no idea what answers our interviewee would give! But we all learned as we laughed over our mistakes and I hope that you would enjoy viewing our video and blog as much as we had enjoyed putting it up.
I would like to take this opportunity to thank my group-mates Fennita, Endi, and Marlyna as well as our interviewee, Warren who is sporting enough to make an appearance in our video. At least, we provided a platform for potential stardom. :P Besides improving on my Chinese, I learned how to type Hanzi and pinyin on Microsoft Word as briefly touched on video-editing for my first time! Without the support of Li laoshi and my group-mates, this project would not have been as fun and successful as it is. Thanks guys, it was real fun working with you all!
Endi
I have always wanted to learn Chinese since I was in Primary School. My parents are Chinese Indonesians, but they both cannot speak Mandarin at all. So a lot of times when I hang out with my Chinese friends in school, I would get lost in translation and often asked them to translate what they said to me in English. But I am really happy that I took the chance this semester to learn Chinese through this module. Li laoshi and Wu laoshi have patiently taught us many different words and ways to make the learning more fun, and this project has helped me to apply what I have learnt in class.
It was a little difficult at first to really understand what Warren said during the interview, but after we talked to him again and asked him, I realised I have a learnt a lot from this video project. I love my team members as well; we are very supportive of each other. When one of us is assigned to do one task (e.g. I was supposed to create the blog), we would help out one another to make sure that our group produce the best work that we can. Fennita, Marlyna and Elaine would be willing to give critical suggestions and help. Overall, this project has been such a fun learning experience!
Fennita
I feel doing this project was fun and I have learned a lot throughout the process. I feel very lucky that I have lots of Chinese friends who taught me to improve my Chinese pronunciation for this interview purpose. I gonna miss the moment when our group were brainstorming the idea, rehearsing the interview questions and getting feedback from my Chinese friends, taking the video while they were watching us and laughing at us, and also editing the video. The difficult part was when I needed to find new words that Warren used to make “the glossary of new words”. But yeah, I’m happy that I learned a lot and our final video was entertaining my friends around. Lastly, I would like to thank my groupmate Endi, Marlyna, and Elaine; our interviewee Warren, and our teacher Li Laoshi to to make this project so fun.
Marlyna
I find this project turns out to be very fun. My favourite part was the planning and the brainstorming phase. We try to come up with an interesting and funny scenario and show it to our chinese-speaking friends for comment before finalizing it. Their comment makes me realize a lot of thing about the daily usage of chinese language outside the textbook. Although sometimes I cannot understand what Warren is saying, his explanation expands my vocabulary, and overall this project helps me to work on my pronounciation :)
As each of us has our own different experiences learning Chinese throughout this semester, we would like to share our thoughts how the past few months have been a fruitful and meaningful journey to learn a new language...
Our group has learnt a lot from this interview. Warren has been a very nice interviewee and he has kindly helped us during the process.
HOW it went:
We wanted to think creatively and we did not want to make it a boring interview, so we involved Warren in this interesting scenario as if he was waiting for a date.
As we did not really know how he would answer our questions, there were times when we did not know how to reply him. During the process, we learnt that an interview is a fluid process; we might have prepared our questions but the interviewee's answers could surprise us and we have learnt to adapt and listen to his answers. Along the way, we got to know several new words that are very useful!
DIFFICULTIES we faced & LESSONS we learnt:
Although we asked Warren to answer in simple Chinese, we did not understand some of his answers at first. So we asked him to re-take, and in the end, we finally got all our questions answered. Indeed practice makes perfect. And it applies to speaking in Chinese too. We learn to practice hard before interviewing people in Chinese.
IMPROVEMENTS in future:
We have to practise a lot before the interview. Reading from the notes is different from speaking. Next time we can ask the interviewee more questions based on his answers, and be more flexible in our questions. We can also try to keep improving our pronunciation, tones and clarity of the words. After all, learning is a never-ending process. And we hope to keep learning, especially to improve our Chinese.
SATISFACTION we earned:
Completing the interview was a joy, as we had put in our efforts to think of the questions and practiced. We had a lot of fun during the interview, we laughed and forgot our questions, but overall we were happy to work as a group, we supported and learnt from one another.
We tried to come up with the best video and blog we could, and we really hope you will enjoy watching and reading it! :)
