For our final meeting, we decided to talk about numbers, months and seasons and go back a little to teach each other more about the vocabulary than the culture of the respective language.
For numbers, we were really surprised how comparably easy it is since both ways are rather similar to also Engish or Finnish and I guess all of us were pretty good at even saying numbers in the thousands since you just “have to put the numbers from 1 to 10 together” in a certain way. However, there were a couple of interesting differences such as that you are supposed to pronounce the 0 in a number like 102 or that there is a formal and informal version of the number 2. Moreover, I thought it was interesting that Chinese people tend to put a comma after four digits rather than three digits as I am used to – however, in Germany we change dots and commata which is probably just as confusing.
I had to laugh a lot when talking about the Chinese months since they are called 1-month for january, 2-month for february, and so on with “yuè” being the Chinese word for month that just gets added after saying the respective number.
When talking about the seasons, I learned the hard way how important the correct pronounciation is in Chinese since the word for “spring” can also mean “stupid” when pronounced slightly incorrectly.
Overall, I think it was a pleasure to meet my team mates and I learned a lot about the Chinese language and culture of which I apparently knew less about than expected and I hope that I could teach them a little about the German culture and langauge as well. I can really recommend Each-One-Teach-One – also for the aspect of getting to know new, nice people from all over the world!
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