F2F Class Notes (Ben)

Grammar

few years ago –>
A few years ago

You can image –>
You can imagine

Before you heard me speaking Shanghainese, how many times had you heard someone speaking it?

Vocabulary

throw up = vomit, when your meal comes back out from your mouth
(throw / threw / thrown)
Yesterday, I was really sick. I threw up a few times.

dizzy (adj) = feeling like everything turns around you
I was so dizzy I couldn’t walk straight.

tell apart = to see the difference between two things, to distinguish
It’s pretty hard for foreigners to tell different Chinese dialects apart.

a dialect = a language that is usually not official
China has more than 6,000 dialects, such as Shanghainese, Mandarin and Cantonese.

creole = a dialect made from a mixture of French and English
Everyone in the Caribbean speaks either English or French, so you don’t need to learn Creole.

the Cultural Revolution 文化大革命