User Comments - aucaman

Posted on: No Change for the Bus Fare

November 12, 2013, 08:26 PM

In the expanson section, the speaker pronounces 张 as /zhao/, which threw me off for a while. Then she omits the word 钱 in the sentence

我要买一张五十快钱的充值卡

Is this what native speakers of Mandarin normally do?

Posted on: All About the Lesson Content

March 22, 2012, 05:24 PM

My iPod got so full that I had to make room for the new stuff, but since I didn't want to delete the old lessons (I know; I'm greedy) I replaced the old files from CD to Radio quality. That gave the extra room I wanted

Posted on: Character Amnesia

November 28, 2011, 05:44 PM

Fascinating discussion!!

I just want to add another dimension. I have found I can learn quite a bit from my own mistakes ("Error Analysis?").  The process goes like this: I see a character (say 揄)  and I think: "Ah! It's yú, joyful" but then that meaning doesn't make sense in the text I'm trying to read. When I look it up I realize it's a new character I had never seen before and it means something totally different ("raise, bring up"). When I compare the two 揄 - 愉 I see the obvious: they have different (but similar looking) radicals. Then I discover that, when I learned to recognize the character 愉 "joyful," I apparently focussed on the right part and developed "a slight perception of a vertical line" on the left. In other words, when I study a characted for visual recognition, I do not pay attention to every element of it. My brain seems to focus on the least elements necessary to remember it. This lazy approach is revealed when I come across another character that shares the same elements I had subconsciously used to retain the first one. Only then do I realized what I had done and I therefore need to look for more information in those similar characters to distinguish between the two.

I have experienced a similar process with two character words. I seem to retain a word by focussing on only one of the two characters. Hence I the first time I see 盘缠 pánchán (traveling expenses), I think it's 盘查 pánchá (interrogate).

Everytime you make a recognition mistake, it can be very profitable to notice what caused the  comprehension error.

Clearly the best way to avoid al this is to write and write and write once again. But I'm too lazy for that, mainly because I have a computer to help!!!