User Comments - BillJefferys

Posted on: Gong Xi Fa Cai!

iTunes did not properly download my (paid) file of the whole dialog.

I get an exclamation point next to the dialog, but there's no file.

Please investigate.

Posted on: The Powerless Phones

The transcription and the discussion in the lesson does not correspond to the actual language used in the dialog. It claims that actor number 2 said:

用我的。

But what was actor number 2 actually said was

用我的吧。(yong wode ba .)

The extra character '吧' that the actor inserted, probably without thinking (and not caught by the folks who followed up), is important. It is a way of softening the comment, to make it not a demand, "use my cellphone," but more a suggestion, "would you like to use my cellphone?"

Also, the discussion isn't right to ignore, and indeed says. that it isn't important to understand the particle 'le = 了'. I beg to differ. It is important.

Here it means that there was power in the battery before, but (change of state) there isn't any power anymore. One of the main meanings of 'le = 了' is that there has been (or will be in the future) a change of state (aspect), rather than what is the state at a particular time (past/present/future tense). That is a huge thing in the context of the lesson.

Please, Chinesepod folks, this is one of the most important points of Chinese grammar for native speakers of English (and most Western languages). Understanding this is crucial for even Newbies' understanding of Chinese. It is because languages like English do not use aspect/tense as Chinese does. So please pay attention, mentioning this and educating your students early in these important grammatical points is important!!!

Posted on: Learning the Lei Feng Song

Dear Changye,

Thanks so much for reminding me of the exact words of the slogan "工业学大庆，农业学大寨". I've mentioned that I first started to learn Chinese in 1961-62 from some books published in the PRC, and both the story of Lei Feng and the slogan above were, if I recall, in those books. I was searching for the slogan but forgot that the first character was '工', which made my search difficult. I remembered every character except that one. But your note brought it all back.

Another slogan in those times was "为人民服务", "serve the people," which was also in those old textbooks.

By the way for those watching, the '服务' above is the same as that in '服务员', which is used to refer to a waiter in, at least, North China, according to some recent ChinesePod broadcasts.

Posted on: What's your (animal) sign?

@kesirui (and others)

I think I mentioned that the 28 lunar mansions along the ecliptic is associated with the Moon. The comment about the Chinese Zodiac not being astronomical in nature comes from the Wikipedia article I cited. According to that article, the Chinese Zodiac is purely a calendrical thing.

The twelve year cycle does indeed seem to be associated with Jupiter, which has an orbital period of nearly 12 years. But the twelve-year cycle of animals is not in lock-step with Jupiter's motion, because of the 0.14 year discrepancy between 12 years and Jupiter's orbital period.

Changye is also right. The Chinese calendar is neither strictly lunar nor strictly solar. Astronomers know calendars like this as "luni-solar" calendars. The Hebrew calendar is another such. (But the Islamic calendar is a strictly lunar calendar, while the Gregorian calendar is strictly solar).

A luni-solar calendar tries to keep in step with both the Sun and the Moon. But it can't, really, because the length of the month, 29.53 days, does not divide into the length of the tropical (solar) year, 365.2422 days. This means that 12 lunar months is about 354 days, about 11 days shy of the tropical year. This means that in 3 years, you will fall short of a year by about 33 days, so at this point an extra month is added to the calendar, making that year have 13 months instead of 12. This extra month is known as an "intercalary month."

This is analogous to the extra day we insert into the Gregorian calendar almost every 4 years, due to the extra 0.2422 days in a tropical year, so that in 4 years you've come up short almost 1 full day, which forces us to insert that extra leap day, making the year 366 days long instead of 365.

Just to make things even more complicated, every once in a while we astronomers add an extra second to the length of the year. This is known as a "leap second," and it's due to a slight difference between the average length of the day due to the Earth's rotation and the length of the day that we measure with modern atomic clocks. This year there will be an extra second added to December 31, making it 86,401 seconds long instead of 86,400.

Posted on: What's your (animal) sign?

@kesirui

On your question about the Chinese zodiac. This refers to the 12 animals that were mentioned above; according to the Wikipedia article, it's not astronomical in nature.

As an astronomer, I'm guessing that you may be thinking of something else. The ecliptic is the annual path of the sun through the stars. In the West, it was divided into 12 constellations, the so-called "Sun signs." The Chinese used a different set of asterisms along the ecliptic, different from the Western zodiacal constellations. These were the 28 lunar mansions, and the Moon would spend about a day in each one. (The Moon takes 27.5 days to go around the ecliptic once, relative to the stars).

The ecliptic is pretty much fixed amongst the stars. But the earth's axis of rotation shifts slowly due to a phenomenon known as the precession of the equinoxes. This does not affect the position of the ecliptic, but it does affect the position of the celestial equator amongst the stars. In particular, the point on the ecliptic where the Sun passes from the Southern to the Northern hemisphere (the vernal equinox) slowly shifts along the ecliptic. That affects where the Sun is on the first day of spring.

But this slow shift takes almost 26,000 years, not 2,000 years. The position of the vernal equinox moves 1/12 of the way around (from one Western constellation to the next) in a little over 2,000 years. That may be the 2,000 years that you are thinking of.

Posted on: What's your (animal) sign?

I taught a course on "Time", which included calendar systems, at the University of Texas (I am now retired).

One of the things I discussed was aspects of Chinese calendar (go to http://bayesrules.net/courses/ast309/pdf03/08.pdf and look at the last few charts of this pdf). Of course, I did not talk about the Chinese characters, since this was a general course, but I did try to introduce the basic ideas.

I've been unable to make this link work from here. You can go to http://bayesrules.net/ast309.html and click on the "Lunar Calendars" link, which should work.

As changye noted, the actual cycle is 60 years, since the "stem and branch" cycle repeats every ten years and the animal cycle repeats every twelve years, so that the least common multiple of both is 60.

Posted on: The Surname Code

@nial

You wrote: "Aw man, CP ate my comment :(  It's never as good as the first time around, I always forget stuff!  Anyway,

我姓沈..."

I don't know the answer to your question, but I do know that if you are worried about CP eating your comment, you can select it, copy it out, and paste it into Word or another application that can preserve it. So if your comment gets "eaten," you can copy it back and submit it again. As an example, I copied and pasted your comment out of Word to illustrate. It seems to work.

Posted on: The Surname Code

@pinkjeans

Sorry, I missed your comment about your using 孙中山. There are so many comments here!

Of course, the idea is to be understood, and 孙悟空 would certainly be widely understood as well.

Posted on: The Surname Code

@pinkjeans

Since (as I am learning) reference to historical people is a good way to explain your surname, you might consider 孙中山, which refers to Sun Yat-sen, the founder of modern China, who is universally known and revered both in the PRC and on Taiwan (so you won't be embarrassed, wherever you use it).

I recall that this was a nom de guerre (a "political" or "revolutionary" name) that he adopted while in exile in Japan . If my recollection is wrong, I hope that someone will correct me

Posted on: The Surname Code

@pearltowerpete

Thanks for the suggestion of using the name of 朱元璋. I like it, especially for its deep historical connections.