User Comments - WillBuckingham
WillBuckingham
Posted on: Delivery Problems
June 16, 2009 at 3:27 PMWow. That's one speedy dialogue.
The usual thing for delivery companies in the UK is "some time between 9am and 5pm." And saying "我不等你了，你明天再送吧" would not, I fear, get you very far over here. Your 送货 (books from China that have spent weeks arriving, or something else exciting like that) would just be sent back to the depot. Or to China. Or to the North Pole.
Mind you, if they were not books from China, and were, in fact, Liza Minelli tickets, then it might be a merciful escape...
Posted on: Podcast Language 3
June 14, 2009 at 6:12 PMThanks for the summary, rjberki. PM coming your way.
All the best,
Will
Posted on: Saying Good-bye at a Tavern in Nanjing -- 金陵酒肆留别
June 6, 2009 at 11:05 AMA lovely poem to end what has been a wonderful series. Thanks so much for all of your hard work on this, Pete. It has been enormously enriching.
Posted on: Podcast Language 2
June 2, 2009 at 11:37 AMA thought on the understanding of every word: one thing that learning Chinese has done to me is to make me more aware of English, and of how much my understanding in my native language is contextual and partial.
Sitting on the bus here in the UK (particularly now I've moved to Yorkshire, not my home-ground), and hearing a conversation behind me, I'm really not at all sure I get 100%, nor even 90%, and sometimes not even 60%. Even talking face-to-face, I think that I very often don't catch every word. I can certainly feel as if I do if the conversation is flowing, because the message gets through, and so I don't stop to go back over what has been said; but I suspect that this belief that I am understanding what is being said word-by-word is mistaken.
Drunkenness (mild drunkenness at least) may indeed help, Azzote; but the interesting question is why? My hunch is that there is a certain kind of deliberative thinking that can crop up when you are in the thick of a conversation that breaks the flow of communication and thus makes understanding more difficult. And it may be that drunkenness makes you less inclined to this kind of deliberation. There must be research out there on some of this stuff...
Finally, I can remember having some wonderful conversations with people with whom I didn't share a single word of any common language. I'm really not sure how that works...
Posted on: Introducing Shen Yajin (Helen)
May 31, 2009 at 3:04 PMMystic, I think that was the exhibition that was at the British Museum in London last year. If so, it's well worth going to see. Hope you get tickets!
Posted on: Podcast Language 2
May 31, 2009 at 2:56 PMI'm probably towards the analytic end of the spectrum - I'm the kind of person who likes working through grammar books, or who at leasts finds that it is necessary to do so - but it seems to me that language learning is a complex business and that there isn't really a single straight line into the heart of a language. As a result, when learning I seem to experience a continual mixture of both understanding and bafflement. But as long as I am continuing to understand more and more as time goes on, and as long as I am becoming baffled by new (and increasingly intriguing) things, I'm fairly confident that things are going the right way. And, anyway, there's a certain pleasure to be had in bafflement...
But thanks for this QW, which is great for helping with that Elementary-Intermediate transition.
Posted on: Introducing Shen Yajin (Helen)
May 31, 2009 at 7:31 AMHave a happy hiatus, Pete! And thanks for PWP season one: I look forward to future seasons, but in the meanwhile, but just want to say that I've hugely appreciated the show. The 20 or so episodes now broadcast are sufficient, I think, to have built up enough courage to go on reading and exploring on my own. Time to pull Zong-qi Cai's book down from the shelf again.
And, of course, welcome Shen Yajin.
Posted on: Would You Like a Drink?
May 29, 2009 at 8:35 AMJust a note on the perakun plugin - it doesn't work yet on firefox 3.5 beta4. It works fine up to firefox 3.1.
All the best,
Will
Posted on: Tea Tasting
May 28, 2009 at 11:07 AM@juzi - there's an interesting story about the derivation of different European terms for tea - either those that sound like "tea" (like English and German) or those (like Portuguese and Russian) that sound like "cha/chai", a difference that depends on the route that the word took on its way from China to Europe along the old trade roads: the northern tea route gave "cha" variants, the southern tea route "te" variants.
There's a nice link here.
Posted on: Delivery Problems
June 17, 2009 at 8:37 AMIt's true, mikeinewshot. I don't think the thought of Liza Minnelli had entered my head for months on end until she popped up in the lesson introduction here...