New Documents coming soon.

The next piece of work I will post will have to do with the placement of   Shiang  上 (up/on) and Xia 下(down/under). If it is placed after a noun it's like a preposition. If it's before the noun is becomes part of the verb or like an adverb...
 Thanks to Frank the Computer Guy for helping me with the corrections. .

The Little Mina Bird....

Here's the first story I'd like to share here.  I actually found this story fun to read, type and translate. If only there was someplace that can host an audio file. I can embarrass my self further.

The Little Mina Bird

One Little Mouse

A Little Mother Chicken Plants Rice

page 67 Stars of my home

sentance building excercises + a nursery rhyme

Page 70 Go to the beach and play

1. In Go to the Beach and Play I had trouble determining who the subject was. If it was plural or if it was singular. Determining tense was a problem. I chose present tense,

The begining!

I've been in Taiwan for some time now and have tried many different ways of learning Chinese. I live deep in the countryside far away from any school that teaches Chinese to "foreigners". I've tried quite a few self-study books and programs but there was always something wrong with them.
"Wrong you say. What do you mean?" you might be thinking.  Well, I'd learn a new pattern or a way of asking for something and I'd like to present my new found knowledge to my wife or friends. Invariably instead of smiles or praise I'd be greeted with a stony face and the words..."We don't say that here."  And they are right! Most books made for adults are geared to the Chinese as spoken in Mainland China. The Chinese spoken in Taiwan is very different. Almost as different as American English is from British English.  Or the conversations are taylored to a Westerner might say but a Chinese person may think is stupid or irrelevant.

A Chinese person seldom asks the question "How are you?" for instance.
So with  daughter in second grade, two in pre-school and one year and a half baby, I've decided to  follow my daughter's lead.  Why not use the Elementary School curriculum to learn Chinese?  And so I do.  Right now I'm about to complete the first grade book  Already I can understand a lot of the chatter of my little students who I teach English too.   I also understand the basic mistakes most Chinese students in grammar and can now explain to them how our languages differ.


I can be found almost every morning before the family rises sitting in the village McDonald's typing away. I touch type the stories into my computer, I try my best to translate the stories and do the various exercises associated with them.  Now I present them here in this blog for feedback and sharing.

The links you see here will be PDF files located at Google Docs, the character style is in Traditional Chinese and the  phonics system is  Ba Pa Mo Fa with the phonetic symbols embedded into the Chinese characters themselves.    Text in red, I'm not very sure on how it is translated  but feel free to comment on any part. Hopefully we could all learn something. Thanks