User Comments - aeflow
aeflow
Posted on: #18
September 28, 2007, 02:53 PMDarn, I was sure it was this instant classic: "A lonely, sexually repressed man. A depressed woman. A summer camp. On this fateful night, they will meet... and their hearts will become one." http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0339034/
Posted on: Traveling and Chopsticks
September 24, 2007, 04:59 AMLantian, Undoubtedly they practice by repeating certain sentences over and over again: 西班牙的雨水主要分布在平原地区
Posted on: Two 'Iffy' Words
September 24, 2007, 04:33 AMAren't there a few more "if"s in Chinese, like 要是 and 假如 and a few even more obscure ones?
Posted on: Traveling and Chopsticks
September 22, 2007, 06:08 PMIt shouldn't be too hard for Chinese people to distinguish different foreign accents, as long as the accent is fairly pronounced, and as long as they have been exposed to sufficient numbers of foreigners from each of the languages. Every language has its own characteristic quirks, which usually show through when attempting to speak a foreign language. English speakers are the ones who can't pronounce ü, and often tend to slightly diphthongize their vowels. They also approximate some vowel sounds that don't exist in English in a characteristically English way (for instance, a French speaker wouldn't pronounce pinyin ben similar to English "bun"). Even distinguishing between dialects of the same language is not too hard when there's a marked difference between the dialects. For instance, with a little experience it's quite easy to distinguish between a Parisian speaking English and a person from Quebec speaking English. I'd bet a Chinese person could tell an Indian English accent from an American English accent. Among other things, a person who also spoke Hindi would handle consonant pairs like Chinese d/t more accurately than an American or British speaker. I wonder about Serge Melnyk though (http://www.melnyks.com/ ). He has a slight but quite noticeable accent (Russian/Ukranian?) when speaking English, but his Mandarin sounds fairly standard to me. I wonder what native speakers think.
Posted on: Yang Jie's Diary: Everyone Is Dating
September 19, 2007, 02:05 PMRash, Amber's first sentence could also have been translated as "Nobody knows except you". Maybe you should think of 除了 as "apart from". In English you can say: Apart from Chinese, he also studies Korean. Apart from Chinese, he doesn't speak any other Asian language. The first can be rephrased using "in addition to", the second can be rephrased using "except for". It all depends on what's in the other clause.
Posted on: You Can and Will Use 会 (huì)!
September 17, 2007, 02:10 PMOften you see 将会 and 将不会 (at least in written text). Perhaps that's also worth mentioning.
Posted on: You Can and Will Use 会 (huì)!
September 17, 2007, 01:23 PMThe Grammar Guide has a pretty good section on 会, which covers some of the same points: http://chinesepod.com/learnchinese/grammar/parts-of-speech/auxiliary-verbs/types/general/hui
Posted on: Personal Questions and Bargaining
September 17, 2007, 02:16 AMHey all you ruthless people... whatever happened to 和气生财 ? :) http://chinesepod.com/learnchinese/negotiating-price-and-payment-terms/vocabulary
Posted on: Ordering Office Supplies
September 16, 2007, 04:13 PMKanji, Cases like 起来 are where a Chinese-English dictionary such as the ABC Dictionary does rather poorly (the ABC Dictionary is also used in Wenlin and some other software). In other words, cases where you really need an explanatory sentence rather than a one-word translation. In those cases, an all-Chinese dictionary like the Xiandai Hanyu Cidian can be helpful. For instance, the "seem" definition for 起来 is given by "用在动词后,表示估计或着眼于某一方面" with sample sentence: 看起来,他不会来了 估计 = estimate, appraise, reckon 着眼 = perceive 某 = a certain [X]; some particular [X] 方面 = aspect I guess this is a common weakness of any bilingual dictionary. In many cases, a word in one language maps fairly precisely to a word in another language, particularly for nouns. So when it comes to words that don't map neatly to the other language in this way, a bilingual dictionary takes the easy way and still tries to use single-word definitions, even if the result is a bit ambiguous or confusing. A monolingual dictionary, on the other hand, has no choice but to write out every definition in the form of a phrase or sentence. So that works better in the trickier cases. It can be a bit frustrating to use an all-Chinese dictionary, because sometimes you don't understand the phrase that gives the definition and have to do yet another dictionary lookup. But sometimes that can be fun: you treat the dictionary like just another book, and read excerpts from it and expand your vocabulary.
Posted on: Singapore
January 08, 2008, 03:27 AMYes, "reckon" is probably the best single-word translation for 估计, because it kind of combines "guess/estimate" with "I think that/I believe that". In most contexts where 估计 is used, you wouldn't really use "estimate" to translate it. Actually, you probably wouldn't use "reckon" either, but that's only because "I reckon that..." is kind of regional dialect in English... but the meaning is usually pretty close to "reckon", I reckon.