User Comments - Grambers
Grambers
Posted on: Expectations and Predictions
June 23, 2012 at 2:07 PMI just thought of another similar word for 'to desire/want/expect something' - 巴不得. I actually learnt this word from the Upper Intermediate lesson on 'Going Home For Spring Festival' earlier this year. The sentence from that particular diagloue went something like..."爸妈巴不得我回家"
Posted on: Expectations and Predictions
June 23, 2012 at 12:11 PM哈哈。。。没想到你们会讨论我的问题。非常感谢你们重视这个问题, 现在清楚了很多。
Jenny - for shame! My avatar is a picture of a Tang-era burial ornament known as a 'Heavenly Guardian', on permanent display at the.....wait for it.....SHANGHAI MUSEUM. My prescription for you young lady: less time sunning yourself in Bali, more time in the cultural haunts of your home city!:) Heehee.
Only kidding. It was a good guess. I guess there is a resemblence with the fierce costumes worn by Gamelan dancers, come to think of it.
Thanks again guys. Very helpful.
Posted on: 高考让我们缺失了什么？
June 19, 2012 at 3:27 PMI really liked the format of this lesson, whereby David & Jiaojie actually read excerpts from news articles during the course of the lesson, before picking out various linguistic and cultural aspects of the material.
The Gaokao phenomenon is - from the outsider's point of view - absolutely crazy. There seems to me to be some continuity with imperial examination of the dynastic period. Though these days everyone (well, nearly everyone) gets to take the exam - and there is another bearocratic layer to negotiation (ie. university), it still performs the same aggressively selective purpose as the imperial exam performed all those years ago.
In some ways, the Gaokao seems to me to be as much an attempt to judge one's aptitude for self-sacrifice and fidelty to the system as it is about the testing one's basic intellectual capacity.
Posted on: Bel Canto
June 18, 2012 at 8:53 AMThis sentence wouldn't be a not so subtle dig at the hoardes of mindless Chinese parvenu who swarm the luxury shopping streets of the Western world's major shopping capitals, would it?
这个包要一万块？看起来也不怎么上档次
Posted on: Bel Canto
June 18, 2012 at 8:50 AMReally, really sorry. Another confusion in the following sentence below.
请客户吃饭要选个看起来上档次的地方，不能太小气。
When I first read it, I assumed it was the voice of a tour guide (or someone similar) telling their customers to be careful about picking a place to eat. In other words, the ‘请客户’ looked to me like the kind of ’请大家‘ you might hear during an announcement on an aeroplane, while the rest of the sentence used the 'subject-description' structure so common in Mandarin. In order to easily understand the sentence as Chinesepod has translated it, I would have thought it was necessary to put a ‘的时候’ after ‘吃饭’, no?
Posted on: Bel Canto
June 18, 2012 at 8:43 AMSorry - me again. Can anyone explain which elements of the following sentence make it absolutely clear that the man and woman have ALREADY got married (as opposed to will get married at some later point). Thanks!
不知道怎么就成了夫妻？
Posted on: Bel Canto
June 18, 2012 at 8:39 AMAh, now I see that 大块头 can be used a little more flexibly than I first imagined. I couldn't help but chuckle when inserting the 'big fat person' translation into the following expansion sentence...
大家上车吧。大块头你坐前面，要不然后面坐不下三个人。
Shove that big fat one in the front so the rest of us normal people can continue to draw breath.
China has always had less of a problem labelling fat as fat, as far as my memory goes:)
Posted on: Bel Canto
June 18, 2012 at 8:24 AMI'm having a bit of trouble with this sentence from the dialogue:-
人家不也一样上了维也纳金色大厅
Can somebody break down the constituent parts and explain how this translates as "She certainly deserves to sing at Vienna's Golden Hall". Where's the 'certainty' and 'deserving' coming from?
Posted on: Expectations and Predictions
June 23, 2012 at 2:11 PMJust to emphasise the usefulness of the prefix 预, how about this sentence (which has a very slight difference to an example sentence used in today's lesson)?
这个预赛结果很难预料