User Comments - BillJefferys

Posted on: Guilin Mifen

@matt_c

Got it! Thanks! Bill

Posted on: Guilin Mifen

@matt_c

Any progress in solving the download problem for the traditional character pdf of this lesson?

Bill

Posted on: Guilin Mifen

@matt_c

Thanks, no worries. I'll look forward to seeing it in due course.

Bill

Posted on: Guilin Mifen

The traditional character version of the text won't download. However, the simplified character version does download OK. What's going on?

Bill

Posted on: Stopping at a Friend's Farm -- 过故人庄

Actually, obitoddkenobi and pearltowerpete, the song "Simple Gifts" that obitoddkenobi mentioned is not a Quaker song, but a Shaker song.

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

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

The Shakers, although an offshoot of the Quakers, were quite different, for example, they were completely celebate and depended on conversions to increase their numbers (which is why there are only four of them left). At the time that "Simple Gifts" was composed, most if not all Quakers did not use music in their worship. Even today, a significant fraction of Quakers do not use music as a component of their worship.

Posted on: Lao Wang's Office 8: Trimming the Fat at the Office

A little more on "go postal." For a number of years when Lance Armstrong was racing in the Tour de France, he was on the U. S. Postal Service Team. His home town was Austin, TX, where I lived at the time. So local fans would sometimes write encouraging grafitti in chalk on the road near our house. One year it was "Tour de Lance," and the next year it was "Go Postal!"

Good for a chuckle.

Posted on: Health Check

My grandfather was a surgeon in China at the end of the Qing dynasty. I've always called him a '外科医生'. Maybe '外科' is enough. Any comments from native speakers on that? (The dialog just says to consult a '外科'...is that equivalent?)

Posted on: Funny Business -- 搞笑， 好笑， 可笑

I have a grammar question

Jenny wrote,

搞笑 is an adjective and an intransitive verb, so it can't take a direct objective. You can't say 你搞笑我。In fact, 搞笑 is rarely used as a verb.

Is "intransitive verb" the same as what John deFrancis calls a "stative verb" in his textbooks, like many words that in English we usually think of as adjectives, e.g., '红'? You can use '红' in contexts where it is clearly acting as a verb, e.g., '我面红了', "my face got red." The giveaway that it's acting as a verb is the particle '了'. But in English you have to add a "real" verb for the sentence to make sense (here, 'got'). You can't say "my face red-ed."

An even simpler example is '东方红', "the East is red." No verb here, unless '红' is itself a kind of verb.

Posted on: Illegal taxis

Hi Changye,

Thanks. This is sort of what I was thinking. '出租车' seems more natural than 出租汽车, so I am not surprised.

So, it seems (from your example '北京出租汽车集团公司') that '出租汽车' is more formal, but not very colloquial in everyday speech.

Posted on: Illegal taxis

This is very interesting. When I was studying Chinese 30 years ago, we were taught that 'taxi' was '出租汽车'. I do not know if this was excessively scholarly, or uninformed, or just what was said then. Now, it seems (and I like it) that '出租车' is what people say.

Can anyone with historical experience comment further? Is there a regional component to this?