Previous entries: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6.
A couple of students came to the office to demonstrate their Manchu skills. Mrs Guan was given the third book I mentioned in the last post (which you can open up and look at to follow along, if you like), so she could say some words in Chinese and have the students say their Manchu equivalents. Continue reading Sanjiazi 07: Showing off students
Previous entries: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.
After dressing up and taking pictures, Shi Junguang, the Manchu teacher, brought out the books he uses to teach the children in their Manchu language classes.
They are not professionally published, but rather printed out using a color printer. I’m not sure who wrote these books, but I suspect they were written by Zhao Jinchun, who was the former Manchu teacher at the elementary school, and who now is the vice commissioner of Fuyu county. Continue reading Sanjiazi 06: Textbooks
On Monday morning, October 12th, we met at the train station for a 7:40 train. On Saturday, I had called Mr Guan (the Jilin City Manchu Association’s resident Manchu language expert), and he said he couldn’t go. This was very unfortunate because that left me as the only one going who was interested in the language. So only Mrs Guan, Mrs Wu, and Mrs Guan’s 26-year-old daughter, who is a graduate of a Changchun college of Chinese Medicine, were to be my traveling companions. We boarded the train and set off on our way. Continue reading Sanjiazi 02: Journey to the … South?
On Thursday, October 9th, I took my computer to a shop to get it fixed (my fan wasn’t on right, causing the CPU to heat up, in turn causing the C drive to crash, apparently). I had brought my copy of Gertraude Roth Li’s wonderful book Manchu: a Textbook for Reading Documents along so I could study while I was waiting, and since it looked like it would take a while, I took a cab over to the local Manchu Association to ask the Manchu language teacher there about his opinion on the meanings of some of the phrases and sentences in the first reading lesson of the book. Little did I know that this would lead into a trip to Sanjiazi, a place that still has living Manchu native language speakers. Continue reading Sanjiazi 01: An Unexpected Party