Thanks to everybody, noodles and 着

gesang
March 15, 2008, 10:40 AM posted in General Discussion

Hi there!

First of all i like to post a very big THANK YOU! to chinesepod.com both hosts AND users! I am addicted to the audio shows (once a mate asked me: "who is this Ken you always talk aboout??" ;-)) and i benefit so much from the comment section. many of my questions are often answered by the time i get to study at the computer (well, thats why i didnt often post anything by now!)... and sometimes its just fun to read! i also dont have friends in Switzerland who also learn chinese so it is very nice and motivating to read about other peoples studies there! 谢谢大家!chinesepod实在是太好了!

Second thing is: What have northern american  people to do with fried noodles? i think i listened to about 4 lessons now where Jenny and Ken said 炒面 is well known to north american listeners..why? they never explain!!

3rd: I came to read this  as a particle used with verbs many times lately. i read its something compareable to -ing form in english, but how do i decide to use it in chinese? i couldnt make out a pattern there...

Last thing: try to give some help back: if anybody of you chinese learners dont know this page: http://www.xuezhongwen.net/chindict/chindict.php

its very, very helpful to find words by english, pinyin or chinese, even possible to "draw" characters in an applet if you dont know how to type...and they have stroke order animations for nearly any character!  

Thanks again! Gesang. 

 

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wildyaks
March 15, 2008, 10:56 AM

Welcome to the Cpod community! It gets addictive, doesn't it? I got friends who make jokes about me and my "friends" from Cpod.

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gesang
March 15, 2008, 04:44 PM

P.S.: http://www.quickmandarin.com/chinesepinyintable/ also very useful!

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mayor_bombolini
March 16, 2008, 12:40 AM

Gesang, I'm not an expert on Chinese food, but I've eaten quite a bit in China, Southeast Asia, and in the US. There are various levels of Chinese food in the US, and most of it is fast food junk. Authentic food can be found in certain restaurants (usually in or round China Town in the major cities). The US has a strange Americanized versions on Chinese food. In my lifetime there seem to be a couple of defined waves. The first wave seems to be influenced by Cantonese cuisine with US available ingredients. The second wave happened in the 70's where every restaurant needed to add something called Szechwan (which nobody in the US knows how to pronounce....Sichuan) dishes with a lot of red chili's to stay in business. Interestingly, if you order something called chow mein in the US there are no noodles. It is a bunch of vegatbles (greens, bamboo shoots, muchrooms) with ground pork in a translucent sauce intended to be served over rice with fried crispy noodles sprinkled over the top. In the US we have something called Lo Mein which consists of fried noodles in a light brown sauce mixed with choice of meat and is close to chao3 mian4. I'd be interested in hearing from others that know the geneology of CHinese cuisine in the US.

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wei1xiao4
March 16, 2008, 01:12 AM

Gesang, I now have that quickmand pinyin chart bookmarked. It is quite convenient as I do not have to switch around on the Chinesepod site. I can have the two open at the same time. That was really helpful. I use that MDBG dictionary all the time. Of course looking up words both in Chinese and English is a given and the hanzi animation is great. But now I have expanded it's use. I have a very difficult time remembering a word because my character reading skills are not great. So when I have a list of vocabulary words in a lesson, I break the characters down so I I know what each character means in hopes of remembering the word better. So when you look up a word, click on the blue characters to the left and you will get a breakdown of the meaning of each character. Then click on each individual character and you will get a list of other words that use that character and that will help you also to make connections in your mind and expand your vocabulary. This may seem a given to many, but it took me a while to figure out how useful that site is for studying as well as just looking up words or translating other's hanzi posts when I can't figure out the meaning.

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gesang
March 16, 2008, 08:06 AM

hello billm, i thought every american will laugh at me and write two lines explaining the obvious.... but then it took half a day to get any answer...and now i got your long explanation...thanks! wow i am also interested in hearing more about this...making me think i picked quite a theme :-).gesang. wei1xiao4 - oh yes, this is really great, thats what making me a chinese lerning addicted (read in this conversation yesterday bursting out laughing many times¨)..sometimes i only want to look up 1 word..and then i spend 2 hours at this page klicking trough those wordlists you mentioned! and i think it IS helpful to remember the meaning of single characters in new vocabs..its also useful to spend some time with the radicals and their origin from the ancient "picture" characters... i have a small book about this, but its german-chinese, i am sure there is an english print, too. (Chinese Titel: 新篇基础汉语•写字篇•常用汉字部首 (德语版) (ISBN: 978-7-88718-201-2) Annotation language: German Author: Zhang Pengpeng 张朋朋 Series: Ein neuer Weg ins Chinesisch 新篇基础汉语(德语版) Publisher: 华语教学出版社 (Sinolingua) ISBN: 978-7-80200-387-3, 9787802003873 Year of Publication:2007). or maybe also in the internet..i didnt check out on this by now! thanks for sharing study experience, always helpful! gesang

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yrck520
March 16, 2008, 08:13 AM

Hello everyone. I am a chinese boy,I want to learn english Who can help me. please add me MY QQ number is 16437728 月下孤影 MY MSN is yrck520@hotmail.com Thank you

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gesang
March 17, 2008, 05:03 AM

my conversation got lost in the list, want to ask for an advice about 着 again! thanks gesang

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rich
March 18, 2008, 09:36 PM

Fried noodles? North Americans? Um, we are well familiar with Chow-mien (Chao mian), so uh, that is why we like them? That's all I can answer in a few sentences (and that is all I know about that)

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rich
March 18, 2008, 09:56 PM

I'll also do a quick thing about 着 zhe: 着 in English is like +ing, yet you must realize it is the continuous STATE of doing something, not the continuous ACTION of doing something. I know this is confusing because I just had to watch my 6 newbie classmates experience this for the first time last week. Best way to describe this is using the verb 穿 chuan1, to wear/to put on. For example, if I say: 穿衣服吧 (chuan1 yi1fu ba) Means: PUT ON (your) clothes That is an action. How do you say "He is puttING on clothes"? Answer: 他(正)在穿衣服(呢)。 (ta1 zheng4zai4 chuan1 yi1fu ne) ( 正 and 呢 are optional. 正 makes it more formal, 呢 softens the tone) Ok, so that is how you do continuous ACTION, with (正)在. But now how do we say "He is wearing a blue shirt." verses "He is putting on a blue shirt."? ”putting on" is action, "wearing" is a state. So that is where we need to use 着: 他穿着蓝衬衫 (ta1 chuan1 zhe lan2 chen4shan1) That is one main reason to use 着, another is talking about the ACTION of doing something while in the STATE of doing another. For example: I watched TV while lying down. Lying (躺 tang3) is the STATE you were in while doing the ACTION of watching TV: 我躺着看了电视。 (wo3 tang3zhe kan4 le dian4shi4) More examples: Smiling I said.... 我笑着说…… Eating while watching TV... 看着电视在吃饭 In the above example, the state is watching the TV, that is what state I was in when I ate. You could change it and say "Watching TV while eating", 吃着饭在看电视 which puts a stress on the action of watching TV in the state of eating... it all depends what happened (the action) while something was going on (the state). You could think of 着 getting rid of the whole "的时候“ (While) phrase, so in stead of: While I was eating, I was watching TV -> eating(zhe) I was watching TV. Hope that makes sense. Wrote this quickly. There is more to talk about and more example I have on paper... will write them up soon. That means