:-)

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在John说两半天的时候，你问他一下什么意思？我也经常到我的员工问一下什么意思？是不是太坚强的反应?

Anyway. （＾ｖ＾）  From the Expansion sentences:

现在是四点半，离下班还有一个半小时。
It's 4:30 right now. There's still an hour and a half until the work is finished.

I often find something simple such as this very difficult to express, so this was really good to learn. You can say 离~还有 (length of time)！

下班 shouldn't be translated though as the work is finished. the work I especially would not say (guess Jason didn't do this one). It would be better English to say something like "There's still an hour and a half to go before we get to go home", or "There's still an hour and a half to go before we get off work"--to use the rollover translation for 下班 there. To cover for the possibility that the speaker is talking about someone else's 下班 (we don't know for sure that they're talking about themselves), maybe "There's still an hour and a half to go before the end of the workday".

Thanks for the heads up and the good suggestions.

我和太太第一约会去看张艺谋和巩俐的电影-上海三合会-…上海还有黒 道问题吗?

That's definitely true of the expansion sentences. They can actually be the hardest to understand/translate of all the material here at C-Pod, simply given the lack of context. (Sometimes even the writer doesn't know exactly what situation they were imagining!)

But hey, that's the challenge, right? :)

For me, TV has no appeal.

对我来是，电视没什么吸引力。

“黑道问题”理论上，在1949年已经全部解决了。

当然，这纯粹是官方的宣传。

通常情况下，大陆很避免谈这一类的问题，因为毕竟黑道/黑帮 已经较少活动于 公共场合 ，或者说 只能秘密组织，和地下进行。

相比，建国之前的民国时代，已经非常得到改善。

但是中国目前的黑帮依然存在，而且势力不小，尤其你可以搜索“重庆打黑案”，其中包括 官场和黑道的互相利用，贿赂，赌博，杀人，等一切列严重影响社会生活的活动。

上海曾经是中国黑帮的龙头老大，著名的是“十里洋场”等地，洪帮，青帮，青红帮，等等等等……

不过我还是能保证你现在你在上海，应该不太可能会在公共场合被公然打劫或绑票。

哈哈哈哈哈！

take care. :)