URLLesson Introduction
So someone asks you what you’ve been up to. Be the life of the party and tell them “I’ve been studying Chinese”…in Mandarin!!! How many cool points awarded to your side? Uber…at least in our book. In this podcast, Ken and Jenny help out in explaining your studies. You will get the chance opine on whether you think studying Chinese is easy or difficult.
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says
November 19, 2005
William
早上好 Jenny and Ken Chinese Pod is progressing beautifully. Congratulations! I have a couple of suggestions for the vocabulary that appears under each day's dialogue transcript on the website. (I tried to send these before but I suspect they did not penetrate.) 1. You often give us in the podcast really useful details to help remember words - for example several lessons ago you explained that the two characters for "journalist", 记者, mean "memory" and "professional" and in Friday's lesson the literal meaning of 马马虎虎 for "so so". Would it be possible to add to the vocabulary a Notes column where such gems can be put and which could be transferred into one's word bank? 2. Also I notice that you do not always include in the vocabulary all the useful words you discuss in the lesson (but which were not actually part of the dialogue). It would be helpful if you could always put such additional words into the vocabulary so that they can then find their way into one's word bank. Finally, while appreciating that you want to focus on basic 普通话, it would be good to know how often you plan to have an intermediate lesson - e.g. once per week? I hope you are enjoying a wonderful 周末 with plenty of 休息 and not overdoing the 酒吧! 保持好的工作 (probably terrible Chinese but I suspect you will get my drift), 谢谢 and best wishes William
says
November 21, 2005
单明
Good site. How about a thanksgiving lesson? What is possibility of more intermediate-hard lessons? Keep it up.
says
November 24, 2005
Daniel Cameron
Hey Jenny and Ken! My name is Daniel, I'm from Australia. Xie Xie!! This site is so good!! And I've been downloading heaps of the pod casts! I've been wanting to find a site to learn mandarin off for a while, and today I found the best site for learning Mandarin! Oh I am so happy I found this site, I have a couple of friends who want to learn mandarin so I'm gonna tell them about it. Keep this site going, it's very good!
says
June 14, 2007
I was trying to download the entire conversation but I can only download it as a Firefox Document...any help???
anounymous says
June 2, 2007
May I ask? How do you go about downloading the dialogue? The file is just a bunch of letters and numbers... Im new to this so can someone help me out?
eileen says
June 4, 2007
Hi anounymous, This problem is connected to the browser your are using. IE sometimes has a few problems recognizing our mp3 files but here's how you can get around it: (1) When trying to download lessons: (a) Right-click on the link, replace the.mp3 extension on the .html filename (b) Change the "save type as..." to "All files" (c) Click "Ok" Here's the hitch. I tried different IE versions: 6 & 7. The 6th version seem to experience a few glitches. I had to try twice or thrice before the solution even worked. It seems like it kept reverting back to .htm even though I specifically set it to .mp3. The IE 7 was a bit more cooperative in that respect. Firefox didn't have this problem at all.
anounymous says
June 4, 2007
Thank you very much for the help. :)
snidersax8908 says
June 22, 2007
another tip is to get download accelerator, its free and it automatically kicks in when you start a download. You have to hit back once your done, but it downloads faster and there is no .htm/.mp3 problem when you use it. Just google it.
anayelena says
July 4, 2007
Good lesson. Just a question about the grammar of "studying at the university". It seems we say, I am currently at the university studying. Can someone explain why we say, "Wo zai daxue xuexi." and do not say "Wo zai xuexi daxue." Thanks. AY
dave says
July 4, 2007
Zai basically means to be located at so it follows the location--that's my best shot at answering why... it translates to I "located at" university study which to me makes more sense than I "located at" study university. I'm not entirely sober right now but it still seems to make sense to me...
dave says
July 4, 2007
When I say follows the location I mean it is attached to the location and not occurring after the stated location.
john says
July 4, 2007
anayelena asked:
在 (zài) has different functions depending on what comes after it. If a place comes after it, as in 在大学 (zài dàxué), it means "at..." or, in our example, "at (the) university." If a verb comes after it, as in 在学习 (zài xuéxí), it means "be [doing something]" or, in our example, "be studying." So the order is very important! In Chinese, the place of an action usually comes before the action: 在 (zài) + PLACE + VERB It takes some getting used to, but with repeated exposure and some practice, you'll get the hang of it. P.S. 我在学习大学 (Wǒ zài xuéxí dàxué) means "I am studying universities." It's a possible, grammatical sentence!Lantian says
July 4, 2007
SERIAL CONSTRUCTION - I think 95% of Chinese goes in the following order. time + place + pronoun + verb + object 六点 + 在家里 + 我 + 吃 + 饭 six o'clock + at home inside + I + eat + dinner. In contrast to English, this order is very strict and unchanging in most cases. For example, it's quite common to switch things in English, even in common speech. I had dinner at home at six. At home at six I had dinner. I had dinner at six at home. I used to mix it up my word order in Chinese a lot when I first started learning, it caused confusion because Chinese listen very carefully to the word order to grasp meaning. As I listened more, the word order became much more natural and kinda easy actually. (IMO, I'm not a Chinese teacher btw).
lunetta says
July 19, 2007
Spotted a couple of small errors in the expansion: 他 two times where it the first time is translated with I and the second with she. Also, is there any difference between 英语 and 英文?