User Comments - azzote

Posted on: Fog or Smog?

Hello,

I just suscribed the "premium" stuff and I'm a little disappointed by 2 things :

1) i'd like to be able to save not only words but groups of words of sentences. I don't know if it's possible to create some kind of personnal folder with favourite sentences.

2) why the expansion and exercices are the same ? it's good for memory but quite boring.

Posted on: Expressing Location with 边 and 面

pinkjeans : lol !!!! It's so true, sometimes speaking unclearly in Chinese helps a lot ! People hear what they want to...

bodawei : maybe your confusion comes from chinese orientation ability more than chinese language. Try to stay somewhere alongside Houhai and ask different people where the North is, you'll get... 25% of correct answer...

Posted on: A Phone Call to the Moving Company

This is Elementary level for vocab and grammar.

Posted on: With Regards to 对 and 对于

I didn't like it either.

Could have explored more of 跟， 关于, as said upstairs.

Posted on: Tone Change Rule: Yi '一'

I agree with Xiaophil about the tones in the pdf. I know, I know, the rules of the pinyin. But in this lesson, not showing them is... well, makes me quite angry.

Posted on: To do

Pete,

Since when you don't need method to do housework ???

Posted on: Podcast Language 2

Tim,

I experience this too, all the time ! It's either nothing or everything... And often, it will concern a whole conversation, or a precise person, or a place whoever is talking to me (!) and it results sometimes in a full special day of terrible frustration, and sometimes in a day of joy and bliss when I fell ready to graduate Advanced...

Mental blocage ? Maybe... I noticed it depends a lot on the subject (business meetings, though, are often obscure even though it's my domain), on the speakers (accent, spedth), on your partners conscience that you're not native and will to include you in the conversation, also on my mood and my level of fatigue (the more tired, the more drunk, the better I understand).

While learning English, I don't remember such phenomen ; if I heard "This man is a total jerk, I wish he would burn in hell" (sorry, I keep the line of 人是我杀的 :o) I would not get "jerk" and "hell" but still manage the structure, tone, general meaning of the sentence.

The big problems in chinese are for me

1) the tones mess up completely the  perception of the "tone" (语气) and

2) it's so damn different there's no way to grab anything you haven't studied previously and

3) the ambiguity is permanent, as you said, on one sound, so if you miss one thing it means maybe the whole rest is wrong...

Ah, chinese !

Posted on: Podcast Language 2

to bobt,

I completely agree with you when you say that the ones who don't fit in have already left. Appart from a few long long time poddies (like bazza), the turn-over is impressive. I'm refering to the comments only, of course, but the comments section is, I think, more or less reflecting the subscription one.

Regarding the progressive level question, maybe you're right : maybe I'm not bored of Intermediate level lessons, maybe I'm just bored of Chinese Pod... anyway, it's still usefull, and I don't have enough time nor money to do otherwise !

Last thing about the sufficiency of CPod : as good as it might be, it will never be able to make us practice (unless you suscribe the astonishingly expensive guided stuff), so, by essence, will never be enough to make us speak. It's just a very good speeding tool.

Posted on: Podcast Language 2

Why all the fuss ?

Of course there's a gap between levels, of course it's hard at the beginning of Intermediate, of course you don't get all of what Jenny's saying in chinese.

Gaps are made to go over them, and nothing would be more boring than having (if it was only possible)a continously increasing difficulty... don't you think ?

I enjoy sweating for a week over an Upper Intermediate as well as listening lazily to a Newbie while reading the news... I can't imagine one second working only Intermediates...

And of course, CPod will never be "enough", who's ever handled a language by sitting in class without rising a hand, without travelling, without a good dictionnary, without practising, without advice... ?

The more medias used, the more the sources, the biggest your pool will become, the more fish you can expect to catch.

Posted on: Excuses for Being Late

sorry, great lesson, but the background music makes it quite impossible to focus on anything !