User Comments - Tal

Posted on: Lao Wang's Office 11: Wang in the Doghouse

cheers zhenlijiang! You know it was once quite common in the UK to see a little sign on the wall in many workplaces which read: You don't have to be mad to work here, but it helps!

re. the Mad Hatter, is it not whimsically pleasing that in English we can say that someone is "as mad as a hatter"? The character comes from Alice in Wonderland of course, a book which always fascinated me when young.

All my life I have pondered his great unanswered (and perhaps unanswerable) riddle. 为什么一只大乌鸦和一张写字台很像?

Posted on: Lao Wang's Office 11: Wang in the Doghouse

Re. your final point: I'm not a native speaker of course, but I'd say that in these dialogues we're hearing authentic everyday Chinese as it's really spoken by Chinese people. There is a wide variation across China in how many of these common words and phrases actually 'sound' in daily use, (just as there is in English right?) One aspect of learning Chinese is to learn to get used to and/or recognize such variation.

If I'm wrong then native speakers please join in the discussion!

Posted on: Lao Wang's Office 11: Wang in the Doghouse

Hi Dan!

re. point 1: (后面我们又听到一个词组). My version is correct. Here the 又 has the sense of 'again'.

re. point 2: Sometimes when I do these transcripts, if a phrase repeats twice exactly the same, I'll just put it in once to save typing time. It should be obvious as one listens (I think) that the phrase repeats.

re. point 3: You're right, there should be a 很!

re. point 4: Right again, I'll add a 那!

re. point 5: Sorry, I'll stand by my version!

Bear in mind bro that these efforts of mine are not intended to be 'finished' to professional standards, there will inevitably be small omissions and imperfections (which I hope will not be insurmountable obstacles for a diligent student). But just as before, I'm happy for you to pick me up on them! Cheers!

Posted on: Tea Tasting

@sebire - 13 is my lucky number! Contrary you see! ;-)

I knew a girl at college who used to quite literally just dip the teabag into the hot water. It would spend maybe a second or two in there! She was appalled by my 13 second method and was forever warning me of the 'health risks' - lol.

Posted on: Tea Tasting

@paulinurus - bro, please can you just let this thing drop? I'm not trying to disrespect you, (you're a valued poddie, and you've made some great posts in your time yourself,) but this little flame war is just lowering the tone and making people feel uncomfortable.

@miantiao - 大哥，我求求你不要继续这个吵架。你也是很重要的用户。我不要看你离开或者生气。

Posted on: Podcast Language 2

I want to thank and commend the QW team for this series, definitely a good idea. I personally like to understand every word of a podcast (if possible). I just find it so useful and interesting to do that, and it's one reason I've been making the aforementioned transcripts recently, to see if it could be done, to see how it would shape my own learning. Many thanks for the appreciation and support btw, those poddies who have been finding them useful. :-)

I'm very much an Intermediate level learner. If anyone is thinking that I'm err.. a Klingon, (j/k!) I'll tell you honestly that at UI level I'll probably only understand about 50% of the 'banter' on a first listen. At Advanced level (which I usually shy away from) maybe 30%. (And I have to study those lessons diligently for several days before I start to feel in any way 'on top' of them.)

Patience is necessary I'm afraid. You have to repeat and repeat, even when you don't understand, and you have to look stuff up in dictionaries, and ask Chinese friends for help when you get the chance, and little by little you get better.

We all have our own individual perspective, and of course there are so many different ways of learning, but personally I don't feel learning a language is like studying mathematics, surely it's more 'organic' than that. Kind of like a plant growing? (Or perhaps like a virus reproducing inside an organism until it either gets better or dies - lol.)

I also feel that it's natural to be baffled sometimes, it's part of the process.

CPod offers a very rich resource to the student. One challenge of using that resource is to figure out your own way of using it. (For example even though I like to understand all of a Podcast, I am aware that it's not strictly necessary to do so. I believe one could learn very well from consuming the dialogues and PDFs. After doing that for a while, you might even listen to a Podcast and suddenly find it much easier.)

And I do think that many language learners don't realise the great value of putting different dishes on the table, (at least from time to time.) I began learning Chinese by listening to the Pimsleur audio course back in 2003. After that I used various books and CDs, came to work in China, (that helps a lot I guess,) and just kept plodding along. I didn't even discover CPod until last year. It's my primary learning tool now though. Looking back I'd have to say that my Chinese has come on in leaps and bounds since discovering CPod, but I think I'd managed to build a solid foundation before I even found this place.

I'll be totally honest and admit that I'm actually a fairly lazy student. I could probably be much further ahead if this were not so. But I hope I'm not upsetting anyone by saying that perseverance, patience and regular practise (of some kind, even if it's only listening to something you don't completely understand and trying to look words up in a dictionary like Wenlin or MDBG) are actually the 3 things, maybe the only 3 things that bring real results.

Posted on: Welcome to ChinesePod

Well, in my humble opinion, if you're looking to buy a real dictionary (by which I mean one you can hold in your hand!), then you cannot do much worse than the Tuttle Learner's Chinese-English Dictionary. This is an ideal 'first dictionary' for a person learning Chinese, not least because it has lots of example sentences. You won't be able to use it to look up absolutely any random Chinese word you encounter though, you'll need something more specialized for that.

And that's when I'd say go for the Tuttle Concise Chinese Dictionary which is bigger and beefier than the Learner's Edition but still has plenty of excellent examples of how the words are used.

baba's right about mdbg and Pleco, but sometimes it is nice to have a real book in your hand. The Tuttle series of books and dictionaries for studying Chinese are really good. If your bookshop can't get them for you then it shouldn't be too hard to order them online.

Posted on: Tea Tasting

baba, I am the Mad Hatter! 哈哈哈！

Posted on: Tea Tasting

I've been using various proxies for a while to get to... *cough* unavailable websites, but when one tries to use them for sites like the one I mentioned to view video, one can get to the site but the video itself will still not be viewable. Maybe I'm doing something wrong but I have some idea it's to do with the way Flash video is sent over the internet. *sigh*, no chance to see Susan Boyle  on Britain's Got Talent for me.

Anyway cheers bro, you can keep your Indian fellas. As I sip my morning mugga (geddit?) I wanna imagine that comely girls played some part in its preparation.

Posted on: Tea Tasting

baba old sport, you should know 2 things by now.

1. Youtube is blocked in China.
2. Comely girls are nice.

Don't worry!

Here's a couple of pics of a comely Chinese tea-picker anyway. (Photos from  the tea plantations in Hubei province. The girl is of the Tujia Ethnic group.)