Elementary - Caught in the Act

Isn't the 吗 supposed to be 嘛? I could be completely off but in the back of my mind I think I remember seeing the latter instead of the former. Doesn't the sentence mean "are you dry?" as is? Heh. Great lesson!

Jordan

I've seen both 干吗 and 干嘛.  Any explanations (Pasden?) for the etymology of this?  It sounds like something that might have come from a non-Mandarin dialect.  Perhaps the present characters are just a phonetic transcription of the original sounds? And is the progressive 在 necessary? I seem to recall seeing just 你干吗？ 

For  尴尬 (awkward) in the supplementary vocabulary, can this be used to describe people, places and situations?  Would really appreciate some examples.  I enjoy adressing awkward silences/situations.  谢谢

shiqiangdan and pcmi7,

干吗 (gànmá) and 干嘛 (gànmá) are both OK for this usage. According to our Chinese teachers, 干吗 (gànmá) is somewhat "more correct," but it's not a big deal.

hi qingdao,

Yes, you can use 尴尬 (gāngà) for people:
他很尴尬。
Tā hěn gāngà.
He feels very awkward.

and situations:

大家都不说话，很尴尬。
Dàjiā dōu bù shuōhuà, hěn gāngà. 
No one is speaking, it's very awkward.

他不知道该怎么做，很尴尬。
Tā bùzhīdào gāi zěnme zuò, hěn gāngà.
He doesn't know what he should do, he feels very awkward.

It's not really used to describe places in Chinese.

Very useful lesson and expansion exercises. But I have to admit, the 老板 creeps me out!

This lesson is too short and simple to be classified as elementary, it should be at newbie channel.

Besides that, quite good.

I sort of fit right in to this lesson. Not bad after a year. A question came to mind while using the expanision section.

What is the opposite of "mistake" I am puzzled with my own native (English) language. I do not know how to say the opposite without using a negative.  example- I didn't make a mistake .

I found myself thinking about this reviewing the expanision section

(trad.) 錯     (simp) 错  cuò; 

in the expanision you used as opposite

(trad.) 對     (simp) 对  duì 

I understand but I usually think of  對 as correct. And "uncorrect" means wrong answer maybe not necessary wrong action.

 Also how would you say . " Can you correct this mistake"

hi ember

“尴尬”可不可以用embarrassed？它和Awkward有什么区别？

sorry 我把你的名字写错了。 amber

Regarding the phrase:

我们错了

This is one of the current favourites of my 3year old:

hi mikenotinjubei,

你可以改正这个错误吗？
Nǐ kěyǐ gǎizhèng zhège cuòwù ma？
Can you correct this mistake?

Sorry... the other part... you kinda lost me in the correct/uncorrect discussion!  not sure what you meant.

Amber

  Sorry I lose myself all the time. Not so hard in Tokyo. One of the expansion sentences I guess I would have said

這個句子對不對

  Without being redundant. Is this sentence ok as well?

hi mikenotinjubei,

Yes,

這個句子對不對?
Zhège jùzi duì bù duì?

is also correct!

Sometimes I get so frustrated with those traditional characters. It's already very hard with the simplified ones and then I figure that I also have to learn the traditional ones. : / We need to convince Taiwan to use the simplified characters too.

One more word for supplementary vocab:

亲热/qin1 re4/ to make out

他们在亲热/ta1 men zai4 qin1 re4/they are making out.

Caught in the Act
当场被捕 (dang1 chang3 bei4 bu3)
被当场抓住 (bei4 dang1 chang3 zhua1 zhu4)

Actually, the 老板 has an attitude that I often encountered in China. Waitresses, ticket sellers, staff on the train could also talk in this tone of voice. But this was in the early nineties and the Chinese are much more friendly nowadays.

Hello Friends,

Here is new sheep on chinese mountains ....wanted to learn chinese before moving to Beijing for the software company establishments...anyone can guide me..my skype id :jp.vaijaeyonth

contact me ...

JP

culturedragon,

Yes, that's the planned economy attitude.

LeoGuerro,

I am living and studying Chinese in Taiwan. I love the traditional characters! I know that's it's more difficult to learn to write, but I wouldn't have it any other way. 

my boss walked in on me while i was listening to this lesson! guess i'll need to be more careful :)

I'm with thomas, 我們要維護繁體字！

Also, I've seen gànmá written as 干麼...maybe that's just the traditional/Taiwanese way to write it?

This is my first time posting, I've been lurking for quite a while though.

So, was the original intent of this dialog to have caught the two miscreants in a somewhat more compromising situation?

I did find the boss's phrase 对不起 interesting because of how she used the tone of her voice.  Because Chinese is already a tonal language, I don't know how to add inflections to words.  It's complicated to still make the right tones, but to add an additional inflection to what you're saying.  Can you do it in a similar way to English for incredulity, sarcasm, questioning, etc.?

Amber, thanks again for always including pinying&translation in your comments&answers. makes it worthwhile to read comments section.

lennier61, do us all(elies/newbies) a favor and go to intermediate lessons.

@leoguerrero

When I first started learning Chinese (47 years ago!) we were amongst the first to be taught Chinese using a textbook from Mainland China that used pinyin and simplified characters. Recall that this was between the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, so it was quite a novelty. However, our professor encouraged us to learn both, and when I was making up flash cards (I still have them) I used two strategies:

1. I always wrote the traditional characters on the cards I made for myself. I think it is easier to go from traditional to simplified than the other way. I might also note the simplified form, but traditional came first.
   
2. I didn't just put a character on one side and the meaning on the other side. Instead, I would make up full sentences, ones that used as many of the new characters in a lesson as possible, with the translation of the sentence on the other side. This allows simultaneous learning of both grammar (that is to say, patterns, as Ken Carroll so rightly encourages) and vocabulary.

To use the cards, I would look at the English and say the Chinese, and at the same time I would write the characters out with my finger. I learned early on that the "approved" method of writing a character with your finger to show someone else is to write it on the palm of your hand. This gave me practice in writing the character as well as correct stroke order, which is an advantage when you try to look up a character in a traditional dictionary using the radica/stroke method.

I found this method to be very efficient, as it uses four different skills simultaneously: Speaking, hearing, reading and the tactile sense of writing.

别说了!

This is an interesting sentence because of its use of the marker '了'

Often, '了' gives the effect of a past tense, but not always and not (it seems to me) in this case. Here, the 老板 is telling his subordinates to stop doing something that they are in the process of doing. So it can't be a past tense marker, because they are still in the process of doing it. Rather, the boss is telling the subordinates to change what they are doing, to complete an action, to stop talking and be silent. This is a very important function of '了' as an aspect marker.

My understanding of why '了' often looks like a past tense marker is that very often an event that took place in the past has been completed by the time the speaker is talking about it. So the "change of state" has already taken place.

Take a look at the WikiPedia article on aspect for useful information.

My mnemonic for the tones of 老板  - lǎobǎn - boss was to think of my ugly fat boss with his saggy man-boobs drooping like two tone threes. Ugh.

(The female boss in the picture looks like a big girl, but that's fine by me.)

I was going to make the same comment as agentchuck:

"I did find the boss's phrase 对不起 interesting because of how she used the tone of her voice.  Because Chinese is already a tonal language, I don't know how to add inflections to words.  It's complicated to still make the right tones, but to add an additional inflection to what you're saying.  Can you do it in a similar way to English for incredulity, sarcasm, questioning, etc.?"

As I am constantly trying to hit the right tones in this tonally complex language, I often find myself holding back on English-western type tones, such as the indignant tone used here by the lao-ban. I often accidentally make a western rising tone when forming a sentence..

It's not confusing by any means, I can certainly hear the Chinese tones, as well as the western tones but I am curious, as agentchuck is, on how to use this in my own language practise.. so I don't end up sounding like a robot repeating phrases.

In connection with the discussion of simplified vs. traditional characters, it's worth noting that many "simplified" forms are the same as or related to commonly used cursive forms. Anyone who gets far in Chinese will want to learn something about cursive Chinese writing. Not only are many signs written using cursive forms, but menus and of course letters will often use them.

I know of two books that are useful in this regard. Of these, the most comprehensive is "Introduction to Chinese Cursive Script," by Fred Fang-yu Wang, who was a professor at Yale. Copies may still be available from Yale University's Far Eastern Publications (New Haven, CT, USA). I found several copies available at amazon.com, not too expensive.

The other is an amusing book, James D. McCawley's "The Eater's Guide to Chinese Characters." This is definitely available on amazon.com, also cheaply. It teaches you how to read a Chinese menu and contains a large number of eating-related words in a vocabulary taking more than half the book. Also, there are many examples of menus, many handwritten and some in various degrees of cursive (though not as cursive as in Wang's book).

Several people have said something like light47 -"I did find the boss's phrase 对不起 interesting because of how she used the tone of her voice.  Because Chinese is already a tonal language, I don't know how to add inflections to words.  It's complicated to still make the right tones, but to add an additional inflection to what you're saying.  Can you do it in a similar way to English for incredulity, sarcasm, questioning, etc.?"

  To me it sounds as if the voice in this case is pitched higher, and the final tone especially is exaggerated. Just listen and imitate. After that you can think about the rules.

Also: Thanks to

jennyzhu says

One more word for supplementary vocab:

亲热/qin1 re4/ to make out

他们在亲热/ta1 men zai4 qin1 re4/they are making out.

DeFrancis gives the meaning of 'qinre' as 'intimate, warm, affectionate', so presumably this is a euphemism.

Hi sophie20461,

Long time no see. Where have you been? As to "awkward" and "embarassed", they are often interchangeably used in the sense of 尴尬, but the former one has broader meaning, such as "difficult to deal with, 难对付，难处理", "not convenient, 不方便", "clumsy, not comfortable, 笨拙，别扭，不善于" etc., according to my 牛津英汉双解词典. My hunch tells me that "embarassed" might be a little more 严重 (serious, grave) than "awkward", although I'm not so sure.

The 老板, if she was really feeling nasty, could have said 闭上嘴巴 bì shang zuǐ bā..."shut up".  Literally "close mouth".  But I guess that wouldn't be appropriate to say to your employees!

I see theres talk of traditional characters

Vs. simplfied, well i have a little trick for that when typing. also there Not really harder to learn its just that once you learn a simplified your use to it &

prefer it to be used/ see it All the time.

The "sqaures" will give people away when they paste & copy

The woman in this lesson image is so 凶神恶煞!

对,照片 很 可怕!

Ah ..  great lesson to get back into the swing of things after a six month time out.

In the expansion sentences:

我刚刚到家。Nĭ gānggang dào jiā. I just arrived home.

比赛刚刚开始。Bĭsài gānggang kāishĭ. The match just started.

I am not sure why they don't finish with the  了  particle.

Also, in the expansion sentence:

你们在说谁？Nĭmen zài shuō shéi? Who are you talking about?

how do we know the meaning is not "Who are you talking to ?"

Hi desluo919

In general, you don't need to add 了 in "刚/刚刚" sentences, although I don't know why for sure. Perhaps it's because "刚/刚刚", which connotes "just happened", already contain the nuance of 了. 

As for your second question, "Who are you talking to?" should be translated as "你在和谁谈话呢？" or "你在和谁说话呢" in Chinese. You can use 跟 instead of 和 in these sentences.

Hi desluo919

As always, Changye's explanation is accurate and helpful. 

I often hear Chinese speakers of English say things like "What are you talking?" and "Who are you talking?"

This is exactly because Chinese does not require words like "about" or "to" in sentences like 你在说谁?

Thanks changye and Pete for your responses.

However, changye, the third expansion sentence in that set does include the 了:

他刚刚打电话给我了。 He just called me.

What is different about this sentence that requires the 了 ?

Hi desluo919

There is nothing special about that particular sentence. 刚/刚刚 contain the implication of "just now," so you can add or subtract the 了 without affecting the meaning. It could've been included in the first two sentences and they would still be correct.

Thanks again Pete.

Hi desluo919

It's my pleasure. Please keep asking any questions that come to mind.