User Comments - byronmeinerth

Posted on: Trick or Treat!

1. Is there any chance of getting holiday podcasts before the holiday arrives? I know another poddie was asking about that as a way to prepare for the holiday.

2. It seems there's a lot of confusion about translating "Halloween" into Mandarin, at least in China? When explaining the English, my Chinese friends have agreed that 万圣节 matches up with All (万 is an approximation here) Saints' (圣人的圣 obviously works well here for "Saints" or "Holy") Day (节) well. If translating it that way, 万圣节前夜 or 万圣节前夕, work perfectly for Halloween. Halloween and All Saints' Day are (to a large extent) Christian holidays, so I suppose I should ask the local churches how they refer to today, November 1st.

Posted on: Exchanging Money

Is this lesson bookmarked with the others in the "All Lessons" section?

Posted on: Pearl Tea

Unrelated to the dialogue, but interesting to me nevertheless. When Ken says, "it put me off it for life," at the end of the lesson, I was surprised at how strongly accented (to my U.S. ears, "life" sounded. I know this may sound mundane to many people, but I think paying attention to accents and pronuncation, especially one's own, is extremely important when learning Mandarin. Obviously, this is true with any language, but I've felt that it's even more important with tonal languages.

I wonder if Ken's accent has changed over time as he's spent less time back home and more time around other expats and non-native speakers. At least for me, I've think I've started to pay more attention to pronouncing my "t"s, instead of changing them to "d"s, i.e. /ˈlɪtl/, rather than /ˈlɪdl/.

Posted on: Paris

This is actually an English question for Ken: I noticed that you said, "...figure out what precisely are they saying." I live in China now and hear this type of structure a lot, as opposed to "figure out what precisely they're saying." This is from both from expats and Chinese speaking English, and I'm wondering if it's Chinese grammar affecting the English for indirect/reported speech.

Posted on: I want coffee!

Your impressions are correct, as coffee originated in the Horn of Africa, in Ethiopia as we know it today, made its way to the Arabian peninsula, and was popularised in Turkey. I think we all can be certain that the word "coffee" made it's way into English via Europe rather than Asia. My proposal that one could argue about the process is simply to question the supposed preponderance of English load words in Mandarin. Take 巴士 (bāshì) for example, which clearly mimicks the English "bus". Yet the English word comes directly from the Latin "omnibus", meaning "for everyone". And that itself is ironic in the context of discrimination on busses in the southern U.S. before the Civil Rights Movement.

Everyone always seems to have some great comments and responses here. I don't know much about China or Chinese culture, and there's a lot to learn.

Posted on: Stuffy Room

This lesson was really dramatic and really helped with remembering everything. Thanks!

Posted on: I want coffee!

I'm not sure I would consider 咖啡 (kāfēi) to be a transliteration of coffee. In fact, one could argue that the process went the other way around, with the Turkish being kahveh. The Mandarin also sounds almost exactly like the Spanish, Catalan, French, Portuguese (all written café), Italian (caffè), and Romanian (cafea). Sometimes I'm impressed with how close the Mandarin can be to the original words. Other times I'm a bit confused though: 佛罗伦萨 (Fóluólúnsà) sounds much closer to the English than to the Italian of Firenze.

Another good lesson as always!

Posted on: I want coffee!

You should try a French press. It involves no electricity and will keep all the grounds separate.

Posted on: To bag or not to bag?

Ken, you seemed apologetic when you mentioned the issue of bottled water. Making intelligent, economic, and environmentally-friendly decisions should never warrant an apology. It doesn't matter if you are raging or liberal, this is just about being smart. For liberals, not using plastic bags and not drinking bottled water is an obvious choice to help the environment. For conservatives, at least in the economic sense, there is no reason why stores should not charge for bags. And bottled water is even more bogus. Why pay for something that you can get for free? The only reason it seems that there is no alternative to bottled water is because we've become complacent. When you boil your water and drink it, you don't need any alternatives.

Props to both of you for providing an educational lesson, both in Mandarin as well as in civics.

Posted on: To bag or not to bag?

Carbon fumes and plastic bags are both produced from the same initial product: petrol. I'm not sure the idea is to be exchanging them, but rather, reducing them. But your thoughts are definitely in the right place.