Video tutorial teaching how to say Are You Busy? in Mandarin Chinese
How to Say Are You Busy in Mandarin Chinese
To ask “Are you busy?” in Mandarin say nǐ máng ma? (你忙吗?). Máng uses the second rising tone. Say this sentence over and over as it’s great practice for this tricky tone.
Say it as if somebody were asking you a question and you respond saying, “yeah?” with your voice going up.
August 21st, 2008 at 12:50 am
Over the last couple years I have put time into learning Spanish, Russian, and recently Chinese. You are by far, the best teacher because how you repeat and use gestures to stress proper emphasis. Computer programs and books don’t work well since they assume one knows pronunciation just because of a squiggle above one of the letters. Further, by you repeating the word, which many on-line teachers don’t do, you build confidence in your students who can easily be misled. For example there was one Russian teacher who mumbled a word, but I kept replaying his poorly recorded one-time use of that word. Later, a group of Russians and Ukrainians told me I was saying it wrong. Please keep teaching, your method is great. Would you please discuss the basic use of tone rising/lowering in Chinese? What I mean is, I was told by a couple people that, in Chinese, the same word has multiple meanings if one uses different tones/emphasis. If this is true, I’m worried I might offend a Chinese person if I stress the wrong emphasis/tone in a word. Perhaps I will be swearing unintentionally? [By the way there is a spelling error on your Youtube page: "I'm hear to teach you Mandarin Chinese at http://www.freechineseblog.com! " Here vs. hear. I know its just an oversight, but since you are helping me, I thought I would return a token of appreciation.]
September 1st, 2008 at 12:29 am
hey yeah im in an Chinese class in high school… junior year and ive been trying to do studying for that class outside of school…
you are incredible i can actually learn words by watching you… and thats a compliment lol
anyways i learned some stuff thanks to you and my teacher was really proud of me and stuff…
and so was my family, and there never proud of me…
so keep up the good word =]]
thank you
December 9th, 2008 at 2:01 pm
Hi
I’m Emily – would you like a free word of the day web widget for your blog? It’s a pretty good tool with the mix of features, including audio and example sentences, helps people to achieve their personal Chinese-learning goals, and keeps them coming back to your site http://www.freechineseblog.com/ – you can see it in action here http://www.transparent.com/wotd/today/chinese.htm. It has really nice graphics, and it’s better than other word of the day widgets because you can hear the word out-loud if you want.
All you have to do is copy and paste the code into your site template. I can email you the code or you can find it on the above mentioned web page. Let me know if you have any questions and any feedback is appreciated.
Best regards,
Emily
February 18th, 2009 at 2:16 am
for me i have been looking for teachers,classrooms,websites for years to be able to slow down and break the words down to understand and actually say the words correctly. i am really glad that i had found this site you really help me alot with the words that i couldnt say and some new things that i did not know about. i really hope that you will keep the lessons going so that i can fix the areas that i need to fix and to learn more chinese.
xièxiè n?
March 2nd, 2009 at 12:09 pm
are there any more videos after this? i want to keep learning!!!
November 16th, 2009 at 12:44 am
I do really want to watch the Mandarin teaching demo. But it makes me depressed that I can not open and watch any of the video here.