User Comments - elroch

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elroch

Posted on: Who is that?
July 29, 2008 at 3:38 PM

A rather delayed footnote to imbm's comment above:

One thing that causes confusion sometimes is that Chinese words are often only partially equivalent to their translations in English. The English verb "to be" has two quite separate meanings. The first is that "A is a B" implies that A is an example of the type of thing B (eg "I am a teacher"). This is the meaning that translates to 是 in Chinese (eg 我是老师). The second meaning of the verb "to be" in English is that the subject has a characteristic (eg "He is tall"). This is not a meaning that 是 shares at all.

Posted on: Lesson
June 9, 2008 at 7:24 PM

In 广场, is the second third tone transformed into a second tone by tone sandhi, when spoken? If so, there might be some risk of confusion about Jenny's comment on the two third tones.

Posted on: When will he return?
June 5, 2008 at 4:30 PM

I do not see why shen2me shı2hou is marked incorrect in the second of the dictation exercises for this lesson. As far as I can see this is identical to the form in the PDF.