For this year’s World Language Week, Sacred Heart Greenwich students from the Chinese, Spanish, French, and Arabic classes shared their work from their foreign language classes.  For their latest project, the students in the Chinese II/III class exhibited their creativity through creating comics, animations, and videos in Chinese.  Sophomore Katrina Cheng-Slater created a comic for her project, which depicts four characters at a karaoke night.

1) Toby really loves karaoke.
2) He is really bad at singing.
3) but, he takes his friends out to karaoke as early as 10 o’clock in the morning.
4) And he makes them stay as late as 2 am
5) His friends Ivan, Hank, and Matt also like karaoke, but he never gives them a chance to sing.
6) One day, they decide to rebel.

1) “You never let us sing!”
2) “Well…maybe you can sing later this is my favorite song!!”
3) “No. We want to sing NOW”
4) “You have been singing for 2 HOURS, Toby”
5) “Noooo but I like singing”
6) “NO! IT’S MINE!!”

1) Boing!

1) “123 extra microphones!”
2) “The first microphone is for you, since you found them.”
3) “…”
4) “I’m sorry, let’s sing together.”

Katrina reflected on her process in creating this comic and the inspiration behind her project.

“While brainstorming this comic, I had been recently wronged by a mic-hog during a karaoke night on my friends birthday,” Katrina said.  “I thought it would be funny to turn that into a comic for this project.  I took inspiration from many different sources and overall I think that the finished product turned out well.  I actually learned a lot of new words from this project.  My favorite word is probably 卡拉OK (kǎ lā O K), which means karaoke.  I personally think it’s really fun to say; you should try it out for yourself.”

In addition, freshman Alana Ukperaj created a video animation for her project, showing a scene at Burger King.  Alana spoke to why she chose to create a video and how it contributed to her learning of the Chinese language.

“I chose to do an iMovie video because I feel that there is a lot more room for creativity as far as editing,” Alana said.  “Firstly, I started off by coming up with an idea that I knew I wouldn’t get bored working with and that would entertain the audience.  This was probably the easiest part out of the whole project.  Next, I needed to come up with basic characters and easy-to-draw designs that matched them.  The only reason for this was that I knew I wanted a lot of time to edit the video and the images. Looking up images and piecing them together was also pretty easy.  For some reason, people are surprised to hear that all the images were made using Google Slides.  Then, after finishing the images, I just put them all into an iMovie project and began to add the voice recordings, in addition to music and other background sounds.  This project actually made it much easier to identify the sentence structures and words my classmates and I were learning.  Furthermore, the application of the material into (what could be) a real-life situation can be beneficial.”

The King Street Chronicle thanks sophomore Katrina Cheng-Slater ’23, freshman Alana Ukperaj ’24, and Ms. Xian Zheng, Upper School Chinese Teacher, for their contributions.

Featured Image by Natalie Dosmond ’21