User Comments - Grambers

Posted on: Pregnancy Series 10: Postnatal Recuperation

Call me an unreconstructed imperalist, but 月子 has to be one of the lowest of the low points in China's cultural landscape - truly, the Turpan of Chinese thinking. There is so much we can learn from the ancients; Chinese ideas on politics, philosophy, matrimony, warfare etc.etc. echo down the ages and reverberate even today. However, staying in bed for a month, drinking soup and not washing your hair, all on account of having gone through THE most natural process it's possible to conceive of (pardon the pun)...well, it doesn't quite compare.

Listening to the dialogue, my thoughts drifted - slightly perversely - to the Aztecs who, as you may know, were entirely convinced of the need to offer human sacrifices on almost a daily basis in order to appease the Gods and sustain their civilisation. They too were utterly convinced that should any aspect of their bloody little routine be overlooked, calamity would befall the State. Funnily enough, no aspect of the routine was ever overlooked, thousands died in an almost unimaginably brutal manner and, you guessed it, calamity befell the State anyway.

Human sacrifice and 月子 may look to be fairly poor points of comparison but they are, I would argue, at opposite ends of the same scale - the scale of irrational superstition. 

I shall learn the phrase "封建迷信思想" by heart. It seems to me a very fine description! 

Posted on: Plane Ticket Refunds

I'm really sorry about this, but I have ANOTHER 'le' question about this sentence from the Grammar section...

你真是越来越漂亮了

Surely the '了' here is unnecessary as the preceeding ‘越来越' makes quite clear the action is ongoing. Mandarin Chinese usually seems so precise and economical. Here the added '了' appears entirely unnecessary and does nothing to change the meaning or emphasis, right?

Posted on: Plane Ticket Refunds

Great question, and a surprising answer from Jiaojie. I've been guilty of calling Chinese grammar 'simple' for several years now (although usually in the context of people asking me: "But isn't Chinese terribly difficult to learn?" ME: "Yes and no - easy in terms of grammar, difficult in terms of script and context-dependency etc.". I'm slowly beginning to realise I may have underestimated the subtleties of Chinese grammar.

Posted on: Plane Ticket Refunds

Of course, if I am correct (which I am now doubting), then the current translation looks to be wrong. Currently it is "What cell phone number did you use to book it?" whereas my - ahem - 'theory' would suggest the translation should be "Which cell phone number did you use to book it?"

Posted on: Plane Ticket Refunds

I'm certainly not 100% on this, but I think using 哪个 implies that there several 'known' possibilities, and the customer services rep is asking the caller to confirm which one of these was used, whereas using 什么 would imply the customer services rep has no context (ie. purchase history on their computer system) and so is asking a more generalised question.

Er...that's my guess. I hope someone can step in to confirm this, or to set me right!

Posted on: Plane Ticket Refunds

I have a question about this sentence from the dialogue:

我前几天在你们网站订了一张机票

Why does the subject of the sentence (我) appear right at the beginning of the sentence, BEFORE the sentence's 'time' element (sorry about my poor linguistic vocabulary!), where in another sentence recently featured in one of my Chinesepod forum threads (几年前我在上海住了六个月) the subject (我) comes AFTER the 'time' element. What's the difference between these two sentences in terms of emphasis? Or is it the case that speakers are completely free to choose whether to put the subject before or after a 'time' clause (ie. would it have been equally correct to say "前几天我在你们网站订了一张机票，现在行程变了，我想退票"?)

Posted on: Group Photo

你真是个温柔，有爱心的男人。谁要有你这样的男朋友，谁肯定很开心...;-）

Posted on: Group Photo

昨天晚上战胜了澳大利亚的Neil Robertson和英格兰最受欢迎的球员Ronnie O'Sullivan （有两个小球赛 - 其中谁先赢三局就赢） 打得不错！合照是比赛后拍的。

Posted on: Group Photo

昨晚在南安普顿(英国)我和中国巨星的合照...呵呵...别说你不认识他! 是中国民族最大的英雄之一！

Posted on: Raising the Rent

If the figures quoted in the dialogue are to be trusted, rent increases don't sound so bad. My wife and I were living in a fairly old, undistinguished apartment in 2005/6 (in what was probably a 70s/80s granite block) and the rent then was 2,200 RMB, rising to 2,400 RMB in my second year. Furniture/bathroom/kitchen stuff was all very old and though it was technically two-bedrooms, the second bed was tiny. In total the apartment was probably around 75sqm. In the apartment's favour was the fact that we could walk to either the Zhongshan Park or West Yan'an Lu metro stops in five minutes (there were, of course, only three lines back then), and we had views of Tianshan Park from the back window. The thing is, my wife and I felt at the time that we were getting a great deal compared to some friends and colleagues. If the rent for new apartments with new furniture is now only 3,000 RMB or so, that doesn't look so bad, particularly given Shanghai's continued economic boom in the intervening years.