Singing In Mandarin

Access audio files at:https://soundcloud.com/k-chu-j-petrus/sets/singing-in-mandarin-recorded The success of Chinese artists internationally across many art forms has focused the world's attention on the developing cultural phenomenon in China, an emerging stage for the vocal arts. As one of the most widely spoken languages in the world, Mandarin is poised to become the next addition to lyric languages. Singing in Mandarin: A Guide to Chinese Lyric Diction and Vocal Repertoire is a comprehensive guide to unlocking the mysteries of Chinese contemporary vocal literature. In part one, Chu and Petrus focus on diction and language, providing detailed descriptions and exercises for creating the sounds of the language. They take a uniquely systematic approach, fusing together best practices from international music conservatories for diction study, with those for Chinese language learning. Part two outlines the historical context of Chinese vocal literature, chronicling the development of the language and its repertoire over the last one hundred years. Audio files narrated by native speakers demonstrating the sounds are also included. Singing in Mandarin provides guidance for both novices and those with previous experience singing or speaking Mandarin and is the first book of its kind to help bring the fascinating and previously inaccessible treasure of Chinese vocal music to Western audiences.

Learn English and Mandarin words with panda cousins Gordon and Li Li in this charming and colorful bilingual first words book! Gordon and Li Li are cousins. Li Li is from Beijing, China, and speaks Mandarin. Gordon lives in Brooklyn, New York, and speaks English. When Li Li visits Gordon for the first time, the cousins must learn to communicate using simple, everyday words. Children and caregivers can read along with Gordon and Li Li as they learn basic English and Mandarin words and their correct pronunciation. Each spread of this sturdy book spotlights a different theme, including greetings, colors, numbers, and animals! And every word features the English and pinyin spelling along with the Chinese character and the phonetic Mandarin pronunciation to help readers practice. This is an adorable and informative must-have first words book for any family who wants to get little ones excited to open the door to learning a second language -- and future language success!

This book traces the evolution of the Hong Kong’s popular culture, namely film, television and popular music (also known as Cantopop), which is knotted with the city’s geo-political, economic and social transformations. Under various historical contingencies and due to the city’s special geo-politics, these three major popular cultural forms have experienced various worlding processes and have generated border-crossing impact culturally and socially. The worlding processes are greatly associated the city’s nature as a reception and departure port to Sinophone migrants and populations of multiethnic and multicultural. Reaching beyond the “golden age” (1980s) of Hong Kong popular culture and afar from a film-centric cultural narration, this book, delineating from the dawn of the 20th century and following a chronological order, untangles how the nowadays popular “Hong Kong film”, “Hong Kong TV” and “Cantopop” are derived from early-age Sinophone cultural heritage, re-shaped through cross-cultural hybridization and influenced by multiple political forces. Review of archives, existing literatures and corporation documents are supplemented with policy analysis and in-depth interviews to explore the centennial development of Hong Kong popular culture, which is by no means demise but at the juncture of critical transition.

East Asian pop culture can be seen as an integrated cultural economy emerging from the rise of Japanese and Korean pop culture as an influential force in the distribution and reception networks of Chinese language pop culture embedded in the ethnic Chinese diaspora. Taking Singapore as a locus of pan-Asian Chineseness, Chua Beng Huat provides detailed analysis of the fragmented reception process of transcultural audiences and the processes of audiences’ formation and exercise of consumer power and engagement with national politics. In an era where exercise of military power is increasingly restrained, pop culture has become an important component of soft power diplomacy and transcultural collaborations in a region that is still haunted by colonization and violence. The author notes that the aspirations behind national governments' efforts to use popular culture is limited by the fragmented nature of audiences who respond differently to the same products; by the danger of backlash from other members of the importing country's population that do not consume the popular culture products in question; and by the efforts of the primary consuming country, the People's Republic of China to shape products through co-production strategies and other indirect modes of intervention.

For centuries the sub-national languages of China have been a fundamental feature in daily life and popular culture, while a standardized form of Mandarin has been adopted as the language of the state (including education). Suppressed during powerful movements to establish a modern, national culture, these local languages or dialects have nevertheless survived, and their resurgence in the media and literature has caused tensions to surface. Concerns for education, law, and commerce have all promoted a standard national language, yet, at the same time, as local societies have undergone massive transformations, the need to re-imagine communities has repeatedly challenged the adequacy of a single language to represent them. Moreover, local languages have been presented in dramatically different and conflicted roles—as symbols of the failure to assimilate to a cultural mainstream (which in turn may be parodied as contingent and inadequate) or asserting the identity of a community as a site of its own cultural production and not merely as a venue for transmitting a national culture. Acknowledging local language as authentic may also reveal cultural hegemonies within regions and contested versions of communities. This ground-breaking study surveys in detail the sweep of local languages in television, radio, film, and print culture of late twentieth-century mainland China, especially Beijing, Shanghai, Chongqing and Chengdu, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. Focusing on these regions, the analysis contrasts and compares these distinct communities to each other and to the ways in which they mediate culture as a national institution. It draws on a wide range of critical, cultural, and media studies and explores how varied genres and media have sought to represent the tensions and assertions within these societies and how they construct the local in an age of globalization.