Chinese for dance teachers and dancers
Having a dance mastercass in China? Planning to visit chinese dance classes? Maybe some of your students are from China? Knowing basics of chinese dance vocabulary, may turn learning and teaching in a multicultural atmosphere, into a more pleasant, enriching, humbling and beautiful experience.
Personally, having an upcoming project with chinese collegue, reminded me – of how important and powerful tool language is for comfortable communication. Even in a bodily expressive dance class, where without a word people can learn by mimicking every movement, language is still comforting element of communication and education.
In other hand learning solely thru the body language, can be a very interesting experience, and also some of the dance terms are internationally commonly used all over the world like ballet, jazz, brake, swing, tango, hip-hop, and there is no need for translation in most of the case. Which makes learning and teaching these dance styles in many places of earth some kind of similar in terms of terminology.
But i decided to use this opportunity and improve my basic chinese skills. Here i share some of the most important basic dance vocabulary word list in chinese that may be suitable for those who have already a basic knowledge of chinese grammary, and vocabulary. List is highly personal, some of the words are new also for me, and others i will be learning thru the process. Viewer may add some of own ,,must learn’’ words and make it more personal for use.
When it comes to chinese language, pronunciation is one of the most important thing, and practising it should be a top priority. Chinese language may have only 400 words, but the tones and inflections usually give radically different meaning to words. I would say that practising chinese pronunciation is like learning to sing perfectly with perfect pitch. Just, remember that making mistakes is part of learning process, and sense of humor may turn ordinary mistakes into an unforgetteble jokes, laughter and memories with friends.
If you want to make sure that you’re pronouncing chinese words correctly, I suggest of using Google Pronunciation Tool. Just copy-paste the chinese characters (below) and double check that it has similar pinyin text.
