Russian and Mandarin Taster Day

The Partnership Project, now in its third and final year, held its last activity day on 22 June 2011. Year 9 students from four Partnership schools attended a session which introduced them to two brand new languages. By the end of the day they were familiar with the Cyrillic alphabet and had managed to write and speak in Mandarin. They all enjoyed meeting and working with language students from different schools as this report from a student explains:

Eighteen of us waited in eager anticipation for the Russian and Mandarin taster day to begin. We came from four different schools and at first conversation was nervous and embarrassed, but soon we found out how much we had in common – especially our love of languages – and got on really well.

We were split into two groups and mine started with Mandarin. We were greeted by paint brushes, palettes, seaweed crackers and milk sweets on each of our tables. After a slide show to introduce us to Chinese culture, history and monuments, we learned the most important aspect of oral Mandarin: the four tones. Tones affect the meaning of every word; for example, with a different tone, the word for the number ‘four’ means ‘death’, and so is unlucky in China!

Having grasped tones, we were able to say basic greetings and sing songs; we had lots of fun listening to each other's pronunciation! The paint brushes then came into play: to improve our writing of the script, we practised mark the word for ‘hello’ on absorbent paper; that way, we could make a mistake and it would simply disappear! We then learnt the numbers 1-10, in both words and hand gestures, and then put this skill into use by exploring Chinese currency.

We finished the morning session with a Mandarin version of Who wants to be a Millionaire?, with questions ranging from ‘How do you say “rabbit” in Mandarin?’ to ‘What’s the main currency in China?’, and thanks to Mrs Draper, we knew the answers to them all.

After really getting to know each other over lunch, our group then began the Russian part of the day. Shapka-ushanka hats and Russian mascot toys and newspapers met us as we entered the room, eager to begin our induction into this mysterious language. We began with a quiz on Russia in general – with questions such as, ‘How long does the average Russian live for?’ – and the winner won a little Russian doll.

After mastering common phrases and salutations, we began to explore the Cyrillic alphabet. Mr Drury gave us bizarre but very effective ways of remembering pronunciation: the letter ч is pronounced ‘chy’ and can be remembered because it looks like an upside-down chair! With this new ability, we managed to transliterate words like ‘banana’, ‘passport’ and ‘restaurant’ with success. We finished the session by making posters, using the Russian newspapers around us. We could cut out any picture and ask for the Russian word for it, and then try and commit that word to memory. Soon, around the room, posters were decorated with shoes, footballers, aeroplanes…all with the Russian words written alongside.

I thoroughly enjoyed this day: from learning to use chopsticks to meeting the people from other the schools, everything was great fun. It gave me a really exciting taster of the two languages, and has definitely made me want to pursue them in some way.

Anna McGee