User Comments - Grambers

Posted on: The Seven Year Itch 5 - Beyond the Itch

Would it be incorrigibly sexist of me to suggest this dialogue was written by a female of the species? 

Posted on: Copy and Paste

Seconded....er....or 'thirded'

Posted on: Number One Idioms

No! You forgot the best 'Yi' chengyu of the lot....一针见血。It's one the few Chinese idioms that has a similarly pithy English version...'To hit the nail on the head'. 

Posted on: Filling a Managerial Position

Thanks Jiaojie. It's amazing how succinct a Chinese sentence can be when you have a good 成语 on your side!

Posted on: Filling a Managerial Position

For example, is it always collocated with 要 (as the expansion sentences seem to imply)?

Posted on: Filling a Managerial Position

The phrase 宁缺勿滥 is really interesting. However, the expansion sentences raise lots of questions about how it is used. In this sentence - 婚姻可不是儿戏，找结婚对象一定要宁缺勿滥 - the original, idiomatic translation (better to have nothing that something inferior) makes little sense. Is this a 'chengyu'? Is it possible to say under what rules we can use this 固定搭配?

Posted on: Registering for 3G Service

I think the best way to think about this is to think of '比较' as translating as 'relatively' rather than 'comparatively'. In English, 'relatively' is almost always used to modify an adjective ('this is relatively cheap', 'he's relatively good at writing'). While there is the implication of a comparison, there is no direct comparison involved in the utterance. You can say 'this is relatively cheap' in English without having to specify 'relative to what'. Likewise, 比较 can be used in the same way in Chinese.

I think:)

Posted on: Email Terms and Composition

I think it's ironic that when writing an email in language which uses ZERO typographical delineation between individual words within sentences, you need to leave not one but TWO lines between paragraphs. 

Tomywesternmindsetthisiskindofstrange.

Whatdoyouthink?

Posted on: Volunteering in China

Maybe there's a bit of confusion here. I've never heard a Chinese speaker use "我好像是“ to venture an opinion about something's qualitative character ("I think that apples are tasty"). 我觉得 is perfectly suitably for this function; it's certainly not 'bad' Chinese.

好像's uses are many, but in terms of John's description, it's kind of used to signal uncertainty when talking about something a person believes to be true (应该 can be used similarly). In other words, you are NOT talking about feelings or opinions; you are talking subjects which, with a bit of research or investigation, it is possible to arrive at a definite answer about. You wouldn't normally collocate it with "我" - so you wouldn't say “我好像她去西部的一个农村当志愿者了" (I think she went to a village in the west to do volunteer work). For this sentence, a simple "我想" would be best ("我想像她去西部的一个农村当志愿者了"). Alternatively - and probably more naturally - you could say "她好像去西部的一个农村当志愿者了" (If you wanted to translate this, you could say it means "It seems she went to a village in the west to do volunteer work" but a more natural fit in English would be "[I think] she went to a village in the west to do volunteer work", even though you never say the word 'I')

All that said, I'm not a Chinese expert nor a language teacher, so I'd appreciate confirmation on this!

Posted on: Playing Mahjong

Can I check how transferable these terms are to general card games. In particular, I'd like to know whether it's possible to use: 垃圾胡 and 摸牌 to describe, respectively, having a rubbish (card) hand, and drawing a card from a pack. Thanks!