User Comments - Tal

Posted on: Dropping and Losing 丢, 弄丢，丢掉

@paulinurus: 大哥！太好了！ That's a nice explanation, thanks. It certainly does take a while for us English speakers to get the hang of that construction though!

@miami_meiguoren: don't worry, you don't need to understand every comment. (In fact posters are requested to post translations and or Pinyin for these lessons, but not everyone will bother it seems.) Anyway for you or others struggling with that, (and I've been there!), check this out and see if it helps.

Posted on: Dropping and Losing 丢, 弄丢，丢掉

Actually I think you mean

shīyè 失业 lose one's job; be out of work

事业 is a noun meaning career, eg. 他一辈子从事教育事业。Tā yībèizi cóngshì jiàoyù shìyè. He's worked in the field of education all his life.

Posted on: Dropping and Losing 丢, 弄丢，丢掉

女的老师说的 “很有責任人”.

我觉得你听错了。

I think Jenny said: 这是一个很负责任的说法 (referring to the use of 弄丢.)

Posted on: Which Finger?

Well bill I hear you, and might even concur if we had actually heard the screams of pain as fingers are severed. 那就是一定太过分了！

It seems to be some quirk of human psychology to remember stuff vividly when the learning is linked to something a little bit nasty or extreme (in some way), and I do find this has happened here!

Posted on: Dropping and Losing 丢, 弄丢，丢掉

Hi applegirl!

谁 can be pronounced shuí or shéi. The second one is more colloquial perhaps.

“从伦敦来的马克” simply means something like 'Mark [who comes] from London.' It doesn't necessarily mean that he no longer lives there, but perhaps it could depending on the context.

As to 'studs', I'm not sure this type of guy hides money in his shoes. Maybe it wouldn't look so cool in the boudoir when sweaty plastic wallets fall out! (j/k pete!)

Posted on: Dog Meat and Animal Rights

If you're naive Chanelle then the world needs more naive people!

I use the 老外 label in jest! In fact it used to irritate me as well, but that's another of the many things you have to get used to about China! Poddies who've never visited should know that if your appearance is unmistakably non-Chinese, you will hear that word everywhere you go with high frequency! Actually Chinese people will tell you it's not an unfriendly term, (but it can as chanelle says make you feel like you are being merely categorized as that strange creature, that source of endless fascination: the foreigner!)

And that point brings me right back round to the beginning again: the mindset of the average (mainland) Chinese person. Generalisations, like comparisons, are odious of course. But the very fact that foreigners and their strange ways are in fact viewed by most Chinese as so essentially different from the way they feel, is why there's just no crossing this particular bridge imho. You could say those children found cruelty easy because of the example they'd always been set, but it's an example that is a commonplace in Chinese life. I don't mean Chinese people are cruel, I mean that for most of them, animals (and by extension the natural world) are things, to be used and/or exploited as/when necessary.

Talk to a Chinese person about animal extinction for example. The other day a student friend was earnestly explaining to me how important tiger penis is in Traditional Chinese Medicine. I expressed concern that even if it was medically useful for anything (which I personally doubt) then it couldn't possibly be right to continue killing tigers just to get hands on one, (so to speak). The reaction was primarily offence and apparent vexation that I didn't accept that TCM was right! Only following on from that was there a concession that trading in tiger body parts was now rightfully illegal, (and as we both know from your trappers, that means very little.) I used the conversation as an opportunity to discuss animal extinction and how people have impacted the natural world with other students. After doing so I was left with the feeling that it's really not a subject most Chinese have very much time for, or care about very deeply.

Posted on: Which Finger?

Neat lesson, but err... 天啊! What's next, waterboarding? Maybe a day out at Guantanamo Bay for the Beauty Pageant girls.

Posted on: Dog Meat and Animal Rights

As for me I would never keep a cat in China, (I used to share a home with 2 back home.) I decided this the day I got here and had the experience of dissuading a group of small children from throwing stones at a starved looking injured cat.

In any case the accommodation in China is hardly suited to the style we keep pets in western countries, 对不对? In the UK I lived in a house. In China you have to be pretty rich to do that. You want your cat to have to climb 16 flights of stairs to get home? The bottom line is that China does not have the same paradigm of 'pets being part of someone's family' as the west, even the architecture tells you so. If you decide to live here (even temporarily) you have to accept this (somehow) or be pretty heartbroken sometimes.

And you do I think have to fess up to many variables in coming to terms with your feelings about this. The bottom line chanelle is that those folk setting the traps are trying to make a living somehow in a society with almost nothing in the way of welfare for the poor, where the gap between the 'haves' (count us 老外 amongst those right?) and the 'have nots' is enormous (perhaps even beyond the understanding of folk like us).

I would be quite surprised if Chinese Police were willing to do anything about making a serious effort to nab cat rustlers. In their eyes it's probably not a 'real crime', they won't change their cultural mindset just because they're wearing a uniform and/or dealing with foreigners.

Posted on: Hong Kong Visa Run

baba,

不到长城非好汉！  Bù dào cháng chéng fēi hǎo hàn! (If you haven't been to the Great Wall, you're no hero!)

I haven't been yet so I can't let you praise me thus! (Though I have visited a kind of miniature version of the Great Wall at a holiday resort in Guangdong, so perhaps I'm kind of a miniature hero! lol)

Changye, yes, actually I do know that one, but I'd forgotten it was called 两点水儿! (liǎngdiǎnshuǐ 'two points of water'). When I see it I always just think of 'ice' (冰 bīng) even though sometimes of course it really is just a variant of  氵or  水  shuǐ  'water'.

I enjoy these kinds of discussions because I think they reinforce learning. Learning shared like this is such a pleasure folks right?

Posted on: Hong Kong Visa Run

changye, to be 'nitpicked' by you is always an honour! *bows*

As is my habit I took my information from Wenlin. (As a beginner in Chinese I have come to rely on it!)

Tuttle's 250 Essential Chinese Characters for Everyday Use (Vol. 2) by Philip Yungkin Lee, (which I am still working my way through, *hangs head* lol), also states that 黄 contains the grass radical 艹 cǎozìtóu 草字头.

To be honest when I first looked at 黄 I thought something like 'but the 艹 has an extra line at the bottom'!

Thank you very much for the link (which I am enjoying as I write). Perhaps we can say that opinions differ on this, or perhaps we can say that concepts change over time. In any case it's fascinating to discuss these things, and I will always defer to your scholarship.

On the subject of radicals I was only thinking this morning as I awoke, we mentioned 'three points of water' (三点水 sāndiǎnshuǐ), perhaps logically the next one I should have mentioned is 'four points of fire'

灬 (radical 86, component: same as 火 huǒ 'fire'; 四点火 sìdiǎnhuǒ)

A few common characters with this radical:

热 [rè] hot

黑 [hēi]  black

然 [rán] 虽然 although; 忽然 suddenly; 当然 of course; 自然 nature