Ni hao!

In about a month, I'll be going with a small group of fellow students and professors from UNI to Beijing, China. We will be participating as instructional technologists in the Flat Classroom Conference for part of the time, but there will also be time to tour some educational institutions and see some of the attractions of the area.

None of us can speak Mandarin Chinese (or any flavor of Chinese, for that matter), but we want to learn some common phrases so that we won't be completely helpless while we're there. I came across a helpful website that can help us reach that goal: Digital Dialects. I'm going to try to learn some of the words in the categories called Phrases & greetings and Phrases & greetings 2. There are lots of other websites that can help us accomplish the same thing, but this one looked less intimidating and even kind of fun.

By the way, the image above is Chinese characters for "ni hao" (NEE-how) which means hi or hello. According to the Urban Dictionary where I found the graphic, if you add "ma" to the end (as in "ni hao ma") it means How are you doing today? -- probably in the same way that we sometimes greet each other with an informal "how ya doin'?" instead of saying hello.

Fellow traveler Brandi Day is finding Google translate very helpful. Type in an English word or phrase and then you can listen to the audio translation and view the Chinese characters.