User Comments - changye

Posted on: 义气

我家的小胖狗“芭迪”很讲义气。她好像饿死也不吃狗肉。因为好奇，我曾给过芭迪几次狗肉，但是她每次都拒绝。芭迪一闻到狗肉味儿就转过脸去，接着后退一步。我家的胖狗基本上什么都能吃，可是她还是有忌口，就是自己同类的肉。芭迪曾经告诉我说，“主人，咱们也像三国演义中的桃园结义那样好好结拜吧。我不求狗肉，但求狗食！” 听说，我楼下邻居养过的小狗敢吃狗肉。我得说那条小够很不狗意思。哎哟，是不是我写错了字？

玩笑到此为止，其实我很佩服中国人讲义气的传统美德。不到长城非好汉，不讲义气也非好汉，讲义气才是一个男子汉大丈夫。日本也有类似中国“义气”的两个观念，也就是说“义理”和“人情”。义理是一种基于道德上的要求的观念，与此相反，人情主要基于感情上的要求。这两个观念比较容易冲突，所以日本人往往夹在中间左右为难。我觉得如果把义理和人情融合起来就会成为一个同义气相似的观念。这可能是好汉毫不犹豫地牺牲自己的理由。

Posted on: 义气

这张图片是不是《三国演义》的桃园三结义？

Posted on: Catch the Train

Hi bababadrwan,

Thanks a lot for your to-the-point advice. I think that I should have read all the postings of mmysdf in this thread before I post my above comment. By the way, I don't care about whether or not Ken's English is authentic, because I have no way to check it anyway, haha.

Hi chiongzibide,

Please forget about the comment, thanks!!

Posted on: Moving House and Chinese Wineries

Hi pete and kimiik,

The lunar calender might be useful for farm work because, for example, it tells you the day of the full moon, when you can work overtime in the fields. This is the reason why the full moon closest to the autumnal equinox is called the harvest moon in some western countries.

But the lunar calendar is actually not so useful for agriculture, since the date of New Year's Day in it moves every year relative to that in the solar calendar. I hear that ancient Chinese farmers worked based not on the lunar calendar, but on 24 solar terms (二十四节气).....perhaps.

Posted on: Catch the Train

Hi chiongzibide,

I don't agree with mmysdf either, and I understand what you'd like to say. We are basically on the same side, neverthless I think that your nitpicking over the English comment posted by mmysdf is not very fair.

Eveybody has the right to offer opinions about the teaching method and lesson quality of Chinesepod, and you don't need to find fault with English written by other guys to justify your objection to their opinions.

There are a lot of non-native English speakers, just like me, here in Chinesepod, who often post comments, more or less, written in clumsy English. This is not Englishpod, but Chinesepod. No offense.

Posted on: Argument over Garbage (1)

我保证，this is definitely one of the very best lessons in Chinesepod. You can learn about REAL China together with a lot of useful (and offensive?) words and phrases. I look forward to listening to a lot more lessons of this kind. Good job!

Posted on: Argument over Garbage (1)

Hi Pete,

几乎每天早上都能听到他们录音广播：“回收：彩电，冰箱，空调，电脑，洗衣机。”

I sometimes hear a different version here in a small city in northeast China, which says, "回收，彩电，冰箱，空调，电脑，洗衣机，没用的丈夫，罗嗦的老婆，不听话的孩子！" Haha, just joking, of course.

Posted on: Argument over Garbage (1)

中国中央电视台CCTV在几年前播放一个很精彩的公共广告。在公交车上一个男生把空罐头扔到地上之后，旁边的一个年轻漂亮的女生就提醒他不要乱扔垃圾，然后她自己把地上的罐头捡起来。我跟本就做不了这么文明的事儿，很佩服她！

大家可别感动得太早，这个广告还没结束呢。出乎意料的是，这个好心的小姐接着把特意捡起的罐头扔出车窗外，太可笑了！这个广告杰作给你一个教训，就是说你千万不能小看中国国营媒体的实力，共产党好像比你想象的更富有幽默感。

Posted on: Leaving Luggage with the Hotel

条 tiao2 used for long, thin things including: fish, pants, a life

”A dog“ is translated as "一只狗" or "一条狗" in Chinese, but unfortunately my dog is not thin, on the contrary, she is very fat. Instead, her tail is long and thin, haha. Joking aside, actually, this is one of the few etymologies of "一条狗".

Posted on: “混在中国”最字榜

Hi elpeggy,

哎哟，错误层出不穷，哈哈！Let me give a “good” excuse for that mistake. I used the chengyu “无穷无尽” in a comment I posted the other day, but at first I was not so sure which was correct, 无穷 or 不穷, and I looked up a dictionary to find that the right one is 无穷, which probably led to the confusion about the use of 无穷/不穷 in “层出不穷”.

如果雪女和诸星同学结婚的话，就一定很热闹了。

Wow, what a surprise! Where on earth did you come across the name ”诸星” (Moroboshi) ? I believe almost all the poddies here, except for Manga/Anime manias, don’t understand what this sentence actually means. I used to read his Manga works, classics such as “妖怪猎人” (Monster Hunter), when I was young more than thirty years ago.

他们家庭很热闹的话，雪女可能会跑回娘家！

As for “绝灭” or “灭绝”, to tell you the truth, I slightly hesitated to use the word in that comment. Naturally, I looked up it in one of my Chinese dictionaries and, thankfully, found the phrase “绝灭的民族” in it, but I don’t want to stick with an example in dictionaries this time, because the book was not edited/published in China, but in Japan.

I personally think that it’s basically an excellent dictionary, where you can find tons of helpful grammatical and cultural tips, but I must admit that I occasionally find somewhat awkward and unnatural examples in it. As you pointed out, I should have said “濒于绝迹的民族”, or “濒于消亡的民族”, instead of “濒于绝灭的民族” in that context.

For the record, the Japanese word “絶滅” has a slightly broader meaning than its counterpart in Chinese and is often used in the sense I meant in my posting. My knowledge about the Japanese language is usually very advantageous for learning Chinese, but ironically, I sometimes make a mistake due to the “advantage”, hehe.

Manchurian people, 满族, has been highly assimilated by Han people (汉族) biologically, culturally, and linguistically, and therefore Manchurian culture and language have been already almost lost in China, so I didn’t expect al all Manchurian people to be such a “major” ethnic group that has a population of more than ten million!

According to an article in Wikipedia (Japan), the number of officially registered Manchu has drastically increased in the past few decades. A lot of Chinese people of Manchu origin changed their registrations of ethnic origin from Han (汉族) to Manchu (满族), partly because of a racial-preference policy of the PRC government.  

Thank you!