Thursday, May 19, 2011

哈佛欢迎你 Harvard Welcomes You

This video - 哈佛欢迎你 Hafo huanying ni! Harvard Welcomes You - is a Harvard student tribute to their elementary Mandarin teachers, and a takeoff on Beijing Welcomes You - the ubiquitous promotional video/audio track for the 2008 Beijing Olympics.  


As James Fallows and his readers point out it is much easier to understand a foreign language when it is spoken by a NON-native speaker than by a native speaker.  In my Chinese class I find it easier to understand a native German-speaker than our Chinese teacher.  I suspect that it is because the phonemes of my native Anglo-Saxon are much closer to those of modern German than are the phonemes of spoken Mandarin Chinese.

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