User Comments - calkins

Posted on: Street Food Buffet

Mmmmm, CPod has me hungry again.  That 肉夹馍 ròujiāmó looks yummy.

Another great video guys!

Posted on: Trip to the Vegetable Market

I think this is Nouvelle Vague's budget "video" for getting this song on to youtube :P

Posted on: Checking Baggage

Absolutely Light!  The best way to learn is by making mistakes.  We all know that we make a ton of them learning Chinese...the scary thing is that half the time I don't even think we know we're making them.

Posted on: Checking Baggage

ptsmith, check out the second expansion sentence:

欢迎光临！
(Welcome!)
huānyíng guānglín

You were right on the pronunciation.

I'm not positive, but I think adding the 光临 makes it a bit more courteous.

Posted on: Checking Baggage

Double post.

Posted on: Trip to the Vegetable Market

The song is a cover of "Making Plans for Nigel" originally done by XTC in the early 80's.

The cover band is Nouvelle Vague.  In my opinion, this cover is better than the original.

The video is pretty exciting too :)

Posted on: Lao Wang's Office 3: A Call for Innovation

Great timing for this lesson!

Though I think the bailout of the FM's and AIG was good from a "save our financial butts" perspective, it's definitely sad from a capitalism standpoint.  And extremely ridiculous that these CEO's would walk away with even a penny of severance.

Wow, pretty crazy the damage one administration can do to a country in 8 years!  I'm moving to China!!!!

Posted on: Considering a Credit Card

34147, yes yes and I don't know!

Go here (from the Help section at the bottom of each page) for help on listening to lessons.

There are a couple of ways to get the lessons on to your iPod (see above link), but I find the easiest is to manually download them (right-click and save-as) from the Lesson Review Downloads section of each lesson (towards top of page).  Then import the lesson into iTunes.

There are also a couple of ways to get a traditional PDF:

1.  Install the traditional support plugin (Firefox only).  Then when you click on the Lesson Transcript PDF, it will automatically go to the traditional PDF.  Click here to install.  It'd be great if CPod would mention this plugin somewhere in the Help section, or put it under Resources.

2.  Right-click on the Lesson Transcript PDF, select "Copy Link Location" (or similar).  Paste that into a new URL.  Then add trad just before .pdf.  Example, for this lesson, you would paste the following:

http://s3.amazonaws.com/chinesepod.com...chinesepod_D0986trad.pdf

You can also get an HTML version of any PDF by changing the extension from pdf to html.

As for your last question, I'm not quite sure what a chinese language pack is.

Hope these tips help, and good luck!

Posted on: Checking Baggage

Amber, thanks for the explanation on 到 (dào) and 来 (lái)...that helps!

Posted on: Checking Baggage

Very useful lesson, thanks.

Question about the first sentence in the dialogue.   Instead of 来到, could you only use 到 and still get the same meaning?  So, instead of:

欢迎来到美国航空公司。

could it be:

欢迎到美国航空公司。