User Comments - BillJefferys

Posted on: The Jenny Zhu Show

How do we sign up for the Jenny Zhu show? I see no checkbox on my subscription page.

Posted on: How many family members do you have?

I noticed an example of tone sandhi (which I mentioned earlier) in this lesson

'几口人' (ji3 kou3 ren2) formally has 'ji' in third tone. But if you listen to the dialog, it is in second tone. So 'ji3 kou3 ren2' is pronounced 'ji2 kou3 ren2', illustrating how when a third tone is followed by a third tone, the first of them is turned into a second tone.

Interestingly, the word before this phrase is '有' (you3), which is also third tone. So why doesn't this affect the '几' (ji3) just before it? (Listen to the dialog to hear what I'm talking about.) I'm not a native speaker, but I think that it is because '几口' are more tightly bound to each other as a phrase than they are to previous word '有'

Native speakers may have other insights.

Posted on: How many family members do you have?

I learned some important things in this lesson.

First, that '口' (kou3) as a measure word is used in this context restricted to family. (But note, that '人口' [ren2kou3] is a generic word for 'population', which doesn't refer to your particular family).

Second, I had always thought (incorrectly) that '姐姐' (jie3jie5) was pronounced as if the second 'jie' was third tone, so that because of tone sandhi, the combination would be second tone followed by third tone. But it is clear from this lesson that it is third tone followed by fifth (neutral) tone.

Newbies can go to the following WikiPedia link, and links connected to it, to learn more about tone sandhi:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tone_sandhi

Posted on: Amusement Park

What jheitz said.

Needs all three: Characters, Pinyin and English.

Posted on: Drinking Game

@Xiaophil

Chinese makes a lot of use of grammatical aspect:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_aspect

This means that a lot of things that we translate using tenses in English are actually expressing aspect in Chinese. For example, we often translate a sentence using 了 as the past tense in English, because 了 refers to an action that is completed rather than ongoing, and completed actions are usually in the past. However, 了 can also refer to an action that hasn't been completed yet, but is to be completed in the future (e.g., "我明天 ... 了" = "Tomorrow I will have ... "). So 了 isn't really acting as a tense marker in such sentences.

As siteng correctly stated, in Chinese you often (usually?) have to get the tense that you have to use to translate something into English from the context (e.g., 明天，昨天 allow you to infer a timeframe and hence the appropriate English tense).

Interestingly, English really only has two tenses: Present and Past. All our other "tenses" are actually circumlocutions that we use to put an action into a timeframe. We call them tenses because grammarians, influenced by Latin (which really does have tenses in the strong sense that siteng mentioned), decided to force the description of English grammar into a Latin mold. In English we have weak verbs and strong verbs. Weak verbs form the past tense by adding -ed; strong verbs change the form of the word entirely (e.g., "go"-->"went", "eat"-->"ate").

Posted on: Language Exchange

@rodrigues

'他每天都要練習一個小時。' just sounds right to me. '都' is often inserted in sentences like this. Ken is constantly reminding us to learn patterns, and this sort of pattern is very common and natural sounding.

To me it emphasizes the resolution of the person saying this not to miss his/her daily practice session. It seems to function as an intensifier.

A native speaker might have a more thorough explanation.

Posted on: Language Exchange

Long ago ago, my Chinese teacher said that '谢谢' in response to a compliment actually sounds kind of boastful in Chinese, as she put it it would as if someone said to you, "Your English is very good", and you responded, "Well, yes, it is."

Maybe things have changed since then.

She suggested that a more appropriate response would be something like '哪里', which, in addition to meaning "where?" is also listed as a humble expression denying a compliment (see for example the MDBG online dictionary):

http://www.mdbg.net/chindict/chindict.php

Any comments from our native speakers?

Posted on: Why are You Studying Chinese?

I've been interested in China for as long as I can remember. My grandfather was a physician who left the U.S. to practice as a medical missionary in Shanghai; he was there from 1900 to 1911 and my three aunts (but not my father) were born there. As a child I remember seeing the things he brought back from China with him.

In college I took a semester of Chinese the first year that it was available. We studied out of some books published in the PRC. So I learned some of the political slogans that were current at the time. But I had to drop it as I was writing a senior thesis and about to go to graduate school and didn't have time.

So I became an astronomer. One of my professors in graduate school took a job with a nascent astronomy department in Texas, and he invited me there as an assistant professor, a job I accepted. It so happened that his wife, like my aunts, had been born in China, so he had an interest in China as well. After the cultural revolution and the arrest of the Gang of Four, he was in the first group of American astronomers to be invited to China.

Because of this trip, it became obvious that travel to China would soon be possible so I resolved to pick up my study of the language. I audited as many courses as I could and finally, in 1982, was able to visit China for two months, give lectures on astronomy to students and astronomers at several institutions, and as a guest of these institutions, visit interesting places and of course practice my Chinese. I returned to China in 1988 to do the same things. Unfortunately, I then found myself quite busy and haven't had a chance to return since then.

But I hope to return, and I use Chinesepod to keep my language skills alive and learn new things.

I think you folks are doing a great job! Thanks!

Posted on: Counting Coins

The accents (口音) in the dialog are very interesting. Notice that the 'n' at the end of the words 'qian' 钱, 'san' 三, etc., in the dialog are elided or nasalized. This is common in spoken Chinese, but I do not know if it is a regional thing or not.

Jenny pronounced the 'n's more clearly as they would be pronounced as a terminal 'n' in English.

Would Jenny, Ken, or some other knowlegeable person comment?

Posted on: Napkins

The mp3 file that I got seems to be defective. It skips, has a big piece of nothing and finally freezes iTunes so that I have to force-quit it.

Any ideas? Bill