I had my first Mandarin Chinese class last night and it was awesome! I learned a very cool tidbit of language history (a secret passion of mine). The English phrase “long time, no see” actually comes from the Chinese phrase—hǎo jiǔ bú jiàn, which literally translates to “(good) long time no see”. Googling it, I found quite a few vague references attributing this to the Chinese-English trade in the 1800s.
(It took me a few minutes to find the ASCII character entities for the 3rd pinyin tone! Here they are on everything2.com.)
I also found MIT’s awesome Opencourseware. They have Chinese classes available and I am going to try and use those materials in parallel with my class to reinforce the learning.
