User Comments - Grambers

Posted on: Teaching Japanese Go

Is there a mistake in this Expansion sentence?

他真是一个完美的男人，不仅有钱有貌，而且痴情专一。
(He's really the perfect man. Not only is he rich and handsome, he's also easily infatuated.)

A man who is 'easily infatuated' would not seem to be a perfect man, right? Can someone help clarify the meaning of 痴情专一??  

Posted on: How to Eat a Hairy Crab

Two comments: I'm kinda with Pauley and RJ - the idea of eating a naturally reared Chinese crustacean based on the 'freshness' of the water in which it was nurtured seems....um....'overconfident', to say the least. China faces so many environmental problems (as did every other industrialising nation before it), but water pollution has to be right up there. It's exceedingly unlikely that any natural body of water in China's lowland regions is going to be good for anything other than basic washing (or dumping old sofas into). 

Secondly, I just looked up the meaning of 'roe' in my Collins dictionary. Turns out the word describes both eggs and sperm. And so, on a sliding scale of semantic specificness, we have 'roe', 'yummy, yummy guts', and 'polluted crab semen'. Take your pick.  

Posted on: Teaching Japanese Go

I listened to this dialogue and understood about 80% per cent on first run. I was delighted, my logic being that, depending on the age of the child the parents were addressing, I could declare my listening comprehension to be, roughly, that of a native Chinese child. I was a bit upset, then, to discover the adults were actually talking to an unborn baby. Does this make my listening Mandarin comprehension approximately 20 per cent inferior to that of a Chinese foetus?

Onwards and upwards:)  

Posted on: A Chinese Bachelor Party

I had a couple of thoughts on this: ConfederateSinophile, some of your comments do seem a little harsh. You sound frustrated by the difficulty of learning Chinese, which is something I can relate strongly to. For what it's worth, I don't think that John and Jenny descended into 'gibberish' at any point, and if you do genuinely feel it to be 'pretentious garbage', surely there's nobody forcing you to listen?

All that said, I broadly agree with your point that it's not helpful to the Chinese learner to hear two people fluent in both languages to be chopping and changing between the two mid-sentence. The reality is that many people conversant in two languages do drop the odd word of their secondary language when speaking in their native tongue (and vice versa). Anyone who has spent time in large multicultural, immigrant-friendly cities like London (or New York, which I know less well) will surely recognise this. It's well worth steeling yourself for this fact of life.

At the same time, this habit is usually for the speaker's own convenience rather than that of the listener (some ideas/concepts are just easier to express in certain languages), and in the context of a language-learning website, yes, sticking to one and trying to be as disciplined as possible on that seems to me to be the way forward.

In today's Intermediate lesson on 'Shopping for the Wife', Jenny explained in Chinese that a certain word or construction (I forget exactly what) was good for "persuading". The word "persuade" was in English, even though the rest of the sentence was in Chinese. And the chances are, most intermediate listeners would've understood the word 说服 had it have been used. Though it didn't make me drastically unhappy, yeah, I did think at the time that that Jenny didn't need to swap languages like that. That said, there are times when a word just isn't going to be recognised by a learner of a particular level (because it is so complex, or literary, or niche etc.etc.) and using the English is a life-saver!

Posted on: Pregnancy Series 10: Postnatal Recuperation

I think I can agree with all of that. All fair points, all very well made. All knowledge is provisional because no-one ever knows what kind of variables are gonna be added to the equation which may unpick what we thought we knew. All this is said with the uncomfortable suspicion that I sound like I have just smoked a massive reefer.

For what it's worth, I feel sure that at some future point we will discover through scientific endeavour what it is about Chinese Medicine that makes it so effective. These breakthroughs could be in molecular biology or psychology or some wierd little niche of physics. Clearly, TCM has some efficacy. It's just that it can't be readily explained by Western science right now. But, like we agree, all knowledge is provisional.

Posted on: Shopping for the Wife

强迫症, eh? The ironies go on. I first came across this word while scanning the Sina Weibo hot topics back in August. For reasons that I still haven't quite got my head around, this was a hot topic over the course of several days. It's a weird and wonderful world.

My 强迫症 revolve around a number of daily/weekly podcasts that I need to find time to listen to. I rarely commute, and so end up listening to podcasts during my daily walk (the only exercise I get). I download three daily BBC Radio 4 news podcasts, the Economists' special report podcasts (intermittent), BBC Radio 4's 'Thinking Aloud' podcast (a weekly academic thingy), BBC Radio 3's Arts and Ideas podcasts (again, weekly), the Guardian's Media Talk podcast (weekly), as well as Chinesepod. (twice weekly, as I listen to Intermediate and Upper Intermediate material). Either I go for that daily walk, or things stack up!

Posted on: Shopping for the Wife

Wow. 'Intermediate' madness. That's five Intermediate lesssons in 13 short days. This, of course, should be great news for hungry learners of Chinese. However, as someone who feels compelled to go through each and every lesson as a matter of routine, I'm feeling a bit stressed out. John, Jenny - 加班会不会收钱？；-） 

Posted on: Bachelor's Day

I make that four Intermediate lessons so far this calendar month. It's normally one a week, right? Not that I'm complaining:) Well done 'Intermediate team' for their hard work. Don't suppose John is angling for a bit of time off in December?:) 

Posted on: Pregnancy Series 10: Postnatal Recuperation

No, no. Please don't take my 'longer this goes on' comment as me getting tired with the discussion. Never! You make some really interesting points. Your stance seems to resemble a (for want of a better word) 'liberal' position, whereby all that matters is how people 'feel' about something - there is no intrinsic 'truth' independent of the human nervous system, and interpretation is everything. I did a course this year with the slightly pompous title of 'Supporting Student Learning In Higher Education' and the basic message was that 'teaching' was 'facilitating' and that meaning and truth comes from 'sharing' and 'discussing' rather than 'imparting knowledge' in a top-down way. It was the polar opposite of the educational culture in China. At certain points I wanted to scream and remind my tutors that, you know, when students are paying (as of next year) up to £9,000 a year to be at university, they might get a little pissed off if all you ever do is say "So, how do you FEEL about this? What do YOU think?" and then nod approvingly at everything they say. It raised in my mind the question of whether, in a world with internet, anyone needs to go to university at all.

There are definitely times where I am drawn to a deeply relativist and liberal way of looking at the world, but these days I find myself returning to a more conservative position where rules and standards matter and that boundaries are set by what the evidence shows actually works, rather than what you think SHOULD work.

Wow, much more of this and people might start assuming I've with the 五毛党:)

OK, so we've done education, medicine, science, religion and now a heavy dose of politics too:) I'm likin' it.

Posted on: Bachelor's Day

I don't think 光棍节 is gonna catch on in the UK; November 11th is Armistice Day, a day on which the nation remembers its war dead and one of the most sombre occasions in the calendar. It's probably the only day in the year when getting outrageously pissed (drunk) and ostentatiously prowling for sex would actually be frowned upon in the villages, towns and cities of the United Kingdom. Funny old world, ain't it!?:)