I started today in a bad mood after reading about the votes against the amendments to the Trade Bill which would have protected the NHS against trade deals, and would have given Parliament a greater role in the scrutiny of trade deals. This is disgusting, and the sad thing is that it no longer surprises me that the Tories are stooping this low.

Today at work I had my third Chinese lesson of the year. I’m going to make more of an effort to describe what I’ve learnt in these blog entries to help my progress.

We covered random sentences such as:

  • It is nice to meet you/Hen gaoxing renshi ni/很高兴认识你
  • He will call his boss on the phone on Saturday/Xingqiliu ta gei de laoban da dianhua/星期六他给的老板打电话
  • My friend’s father is from China/Wo pengyou de baba shi zhongouren/我朋友的爸爸是中国人
We then looked at directions:
  • up/shangmian/上面
  • down/xiamian/下面
  • infront/qianmian/前面
  • behind/houmian/后面
  • inside/limian/里面
Using directions can help us create more complex sentences like:
  • The cup is on the table/beizi zai zhuozi shangmian/被子在桌子上面

I need to figure out how to get pinyin accents working on this keyboard.