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We at the Cathay Cafe would like to wish you a healthy and prosperous New Year in 2007. Our New Year's resolution is to continue providing you with pertinent travel and culture information about China, as well as provide you with the means to easily communicate in Mandarin using our revolutionary phonetic English approach. Come visit us at the Cathay Cafe; we're most certainly on your way!

Yes, there will be fireworks and merry-making on January 1st, as the Chinese lightly pay homage to the Gregorian calendar's marking of the New Year. And yes, of course, the expatriate communities throughout China will make celebration of the event, wining and dining out in pretty much the same fashion as they would back in their home countries. After all, it's a standard tradition. But the "real" Chinese New Year, also known as Spring Festival, is celebrated on the first new moon of the new year (referring to the lunar calendar), which falls this year on February 18th. The Year of the Dog is almost over; it will soon be the Year of the Pig. The Chinese New Year's holiday is equivalent to westerners' celebration of Christmas; it's the grandest event of the year.

Preparations for the Lunar New Year begin a month early, with people following a series of traditions. The Chinese begin buying presents, decorating materials, food and clothing. A huge clean up gets underway, homes are cleaned top to bottom, sweeping away any traces of bad luck, and doors and windowpanes are given a new coat of paint, usually red. Doors and windows are then decorated with paper cuts and couplets with themes centering on happiness, wealth and longevity printed on them. The menu for the New year's Eve Dinner is usually plotted out, and money is being tucked away in red envelopes, called Hohng Baow, and will be handed out to friends and relatives.

The underlying message of Chinese New Year is one of peace and happiness for family members and friends. In our February issue of Freshly Brewed, we'll be telling you more about this holiday, as well as sharing about the upcoming Lantern Festival.

There's a common expression in China that phonetically sounds like this: Meen ee shir way tee-en. "Food is god." I had a taxi driver once tell me, "Americans make good soldiers. Chinese make good food." I'm fairly apolitical, so I didn't have much to say about why we Americans are reputed as warriors, but I did readily agree that Chinese are the lords of the kitchen.

Chances are there will be times you'll end up at a Chinese restaurant, and one look at the menu will be a bit discombobulating:unless the menu includes pictures, your options of entre es will be listed in pictographs commonly recognized as Chinese characters, which to most of us westerners, become an undecipherable encryption that dampens enthusiasm, as well as the appetite. But no worries! You can eat out using our phonetic English guide. We'll provide you with many words and phrases in our next several newsletters to allow you to order many items you'd like to have. We'll begin with the basics, then move into specific vegetable and meat dishes in our February and March issues. Let's begin!

Simply because it's the fastest and easiest way!

Phonics is the branch of language study that deals with specific speech sounds, their production and combination, and their written symbols, or phonograms, (what we commonly refer to as letters). Linguists classify these sounds into a number of abstract categories called phonics, which are a family of closely related speech sounds regarded as a single sound and represented in phonetic transcription with specific, learned symbols (again, referring to letters). An example would be the family sounds of "r" in bring, red and round. Any differences between such sounds are due to the modifying influence of the adjacent sounds.

Phonemes are the building blocks of early reading. As children, we were all taught how to decode written language – breaking them into parts that make each sound. There's an entire study of this broad subject, and plenty of written by men and women far more knowledgeable on the subject than myself, the likes of Priscilla Griffith, Marilyn Jager Adams, Theodore Harris and many others.

My point is that the English alphabet is a sound/symbol system, not a pictographic one like Chinese. At an early age, we were all programmed to break words into syllables and then into individual speech sounds (phonemes). We have been taught a specific system that is very difficult to by-pass in later years. It's not impossible to re-wire our inner programming; it simply takes a lot of time and specific effort.

When China adopted the Pinyin alphabet as the Romanization of their traditionally pictographic alphabet, they were unintentionally requiring native English learners to associate their Pinyin phonemes with their own unique sounds… Can you see where the wires cross here?

What this means is that the native English reader/speaker must unlearn English phonetics in favor of relearning phonics based on Chinese Pinyin. In other words, native English speakers normally need to spend months unlearning one system (programmed into us since early childhood) to relearn another.

In addition, Pinyin is based on a system that English readers find extremely confusing because some of the phonemes are phonetically pronounced similar to those used in English, and others are not!

With SPEAK E-Z CHINESE In Phonetic English, you can simply by-pass the complex Pinyin system with user-friendly words, phrases and sentences in phonetic English. And in addition to simplifying the learning process, we hope we've made both the book and the downloadable lessons fun and practical. Let us know what you think!