Maybe there could have been a third person in the dialogue who says, "I'm going to get a sunburn", but then we're starting to get more dialogue than Cpod usually has in an elementary lesson.  

Sorry, but you are showing your age, at least according to this :-):

http://grammar.quickanddirtytips.com/on-accident-versus-by-accident.aspx

It looks like the rules are changing.

Anyway, I am puzzled why they wrote:

Today's lesson is all about getting a tan (period) On accident (period) Because of lack of preparedness.

Am I wrong to think this is strange?

* hmm on second thought, the whole "accident" thing seems a bit unsuitable for this situation. That bothers me now. Unintended, unwanted, unplanned. "A tan you didn't mean to get". "A tan you carelessly failed to prevent", you know. But an accidental tan--? Please don't tell me this is also age-related. *

Whatever, you can talk how you like... though you won't convince me that it is actually grammatically correct. Isn't the phrase based on a thing happening "by way of an accident", so to say something happened "on an accident" just seems wrong. Rather than the rule changing, isn't it just people speaking incorrectly?

Personally, I prefer maintaining some standards of written English.

Anyway...

I think accidentally got a tan is okay. Somebody was lying on the beach, didn't pay attention, then voila--big ol' dark tan. It wasn't on purpose, so couldn't we say it was by/on accident? hmmm...

I also feel like I see more deeply tanned male city-dwellers in Japan. (One of my friends in Chiba is a surfer.)

Oh I guess people sometimes can talk like that, but to me it's strange; like saying "I accidentally lost weight".

Now do I have to watch the boards and listen to all the lessons, to make sure you're not spreading outdated info about Japan (sometimes I feel like I have to watch Changye. He's been away too long)??

Australia is reputed to have the highest incidence of skin cancer in the world, all those Anglo-Saxons soaking up the sun and surf.  But the slip-slop-slap (cancer awareness) programs have created a whole generation of Australian people with serious Vitamin D deficiencies.  We now do not get enough sun.  

People think if they walk to work or go for a run they will get enough sun.  Unfortunately 'slip-slop-slap' is so ingrained that they wear a hat and sunscreen, even sun-screened clothes (I remember buying shirts with a sun-screen rating.)  

I am now under doctor's orders to sun-bake.  :)  Fortunately I live in one of the few places in China where this is both feasible (blue skies) and enjoyable (not too hot).  

'Showing your age' - yeah, tell me something new. :)

But there is a difference between evolving language (which I am a great fan of) and bad expression. Even if it is increasingly difficult to find the line. This is just bad expression, at this point in time in our history. It grates, it sounds horrible, it is wrong, it has no credibility. Doesn't it?

Yes, ... I know language change creeps up on us.

The only way this expression will succeed is if it creeps up on us, burrows silently into our flesh, spreads through our bodies and eats our brains. ;-) Oh,... and if it is given air by ChinesePod.

ma_tai - I fear that NOW I have been too harsh, on accident.

That said, I know what you mean. I fear the day that 'cuz' replaces 'because'. It may take fifty years, but I bet it will, and it will be my turn to stand up for the purity of English language.

Shouldn't it be gān To Dry?

Shouldn't To do be gàn?

At the end of the day, I'm with Bodawei, this crates on me. Just sounds like bad English.

'cuz' or 'cos' sounds way better to me than 'on accident'. They are both used in everyday speech, probably more often than 'because'. I don't think that will take 50 years.

I just had a thought about all these ESL teachers in China, all teaching, assessing, marking, advising their students in quite different ways. It definitely does not just come down to accent differences, does it? I suddenly feel sorry for the Chinese students.

I've only seen it used as "frost".  Any thoughts on why that's used here?  A light covering of fangshaishuang being similar to a light covering of frost on a branch?

You are aware that threading was introduced so we could vent in peace? :)

Okay, 。。 you're the boss:

我偶然遇到马可 wǒ ǒurán yùdào mǎkě (I met Marco by accident, or I met Marco on accident)

偶然 ǒurán (by accident OR on accident).

I am determined not to say anything rude about the state of education in Indiana. ：）

I and some other Australians I know have a vitamin D deficiency after living in China a couple of years. In summer in Hangzhou it is too hot to go out in the sun even if I wanted to and at other times of the year the sun is not very bright most of the time. I think vitamin D deficiency must be common for Chinese people but don't know for sure.

i heard recently that if you put mushrooms in the sum for half an hour before eating them they soak up a lot of vitamin D. I havn't tried it yet.

Technically, you don't soak vitamin D from the sun, but produce it from the UV in the sun. You can ingest it (mainly frm dairy I believe), but it isn't as efficient.

I also have serious doubts about advice to sunbake, it would only be about 30 minutes in winter that you really need, unless you have some serious need for vitamin D, which in that case you would probably use supplements. Although if you live in China, where there are issues with sun strength especially with the pollution in some areas, there might be a greater need to sunbake.

The new issue with vitamin D defficiency is it's link to some cancers, and the more intermediate issue of rickets rarely if ever occurs in Australia.

Certain sunblocks can kill coral, some older types have even been linked with cancer, but they are being phased out.

As Australia gets more and more Asian immigrants and university students, you start to notice more of their cultural values they bring with them, and the avoidance of sun is one I have seen. You never saw people on the street with sun umbrellas until a few years ago, only the big ones at the beach or at a picnic. Now they are not that uncommon.

The regime is two 15 minute periods of bright sun and a supplement ( 1,000 IU of vitamin D3) each day - so the word 'sunbake' is perhaps misleading. But it is a convenient word for taking your clothes off and lying in the sun. And obviously you can't do that every day; eg. today it is raining. :( After 15 minutes the body stops absorbing Vitamin D I'm told. And dietary vitamin D is insufficient. Actually summer is when I need to work on getting enough sun here - it is the wet season; lots of overcast days.

Sun avoidance in Australia started way before Asian immigration started in earnest (cancer awareness in Qld at least was widespread by no later than the 1960s - my parents counselled me about the risk of skin cancer in the 1950s.) But perhaps the Chinese introduced another way for the Australian to hide from the sun.

I probably use "on accident" occasionally, but "by accident" sounds better to my ear if I am thinking about it.

Tiānshuǐ, Huī County, Gansu Province. Plenty of blue sky, not too hot. Dare i say it: the well water is somewhat clean! Actually, much of Gansu province is reasonably clean air except Lanzhou. This is likely because farming by hand doesn't create as much air pollution, and not too many factories around.

What I was going for here was: "I was just being dramatic." What would be the proper way to say that?

也许：

我只是被戏剧性

但是，我不知道如果意思是一样的

CORRECTION:

你去哪兒了？怎麼曬得這麼黑？
(We're did you go? How did you get so tan?)

We're = Where

I think tan is okay here because it could be interpreted as an adjective, and it wouldn't come without precedent. Surely we wouldn't normally say, "Where did you get so reddened."

By the way, I truly love how people here care enough about language to debate about this stuff - even the Americans, with their funny vulgarized version of English... ;-)o

And as for my place in the whole debate, I'm on neither side. My mother tongue is a dialect of English heavily influenced by Irish, replete with regionalisms nobody else understands.

When it comes to accents and variation, I'm not much of a linguistic purist. I'm totally with you, Suxiaoya, on the fact that it's great people can debate language on here too... however, I'm a little disappointed when people mistakenly assume that their regional variant of our rich language is "the right one."

To vulgarity! :-)

The sentence 他今天有没有打电话给你？ in the expansion section is translated as "Has he called you today?" I assume because 没 in 有没有 indicates the past. How would I say: "Will he/is he going to call you today?" Has he called you today?" I assume because 有没有Has he called you today?" I assume because 有没有 indicates the past. How would I say: "Will he/is he going to call you today?"

他/她今天会不会打电话给你？

Tā jīntiān huì bu huì dǎ diànhuà gěi nǐ？

Do our teachers have any others?

I found this translation:

太阳晒后黑白不均的痕迹

But it obviously is a definition.

In my dreamland there is a Chinese word that is almost a direct translation of 'farmer's tan'.

We just say: 这里跟那里颜色不一样了。这里晒黑了，那里没有。

zhèli gēn zhèli yánsè bù yīyàng le. zhèli shàihēi le , nà li méiyǒu.

Am I right ?

* 晒伤 shàishāng also is sunburn.

另外，i don't know if it was the same meaning. “if”应该翻译为“是否”，而不能翻译成“如果”。“我不知道意思是否一样。”