User Comments - changye
changye
Posted on: Regional Accents Part I
April 22, 2008 at 11:01 PMHi Chinesepod, Thank you for correcting the order of speech in the lesson.
Posted on: Regional Accents Part I
April 22, 2008 at 12:49 PMHi casie, Please listen to the lesson again. I still think that the third person is a MAN. By the way, thanks for your info about dialects in 福建省! I didn’t know that there were so many dialects in one province. Which dialect do you usually speak at home?
Posted on: Regional Accents Part I
April 22, 2008 at 9:18 AMStudying pronunciations in dialects is very important in historical Chinese phonology, because the dialects in China commonly still preserve their ancient tones and pronunciations in them. Conversely speaking, if by any chance 普通话 drives out dialects all over China, it would possibly cause great damage to Chinese phonology. BUT there is no need to worry. You have an excellent dictionary “汉语方音字汇”. It was edited by Beijing University in 1962 and contains about 3,000 Chinese characters in it, and every character is accompanied by 20 different major dialect pronunciations, which are based on a nation-wide survey performed between 1956 and 1958. I really respect those researchers and scholars who took part in this “China-scale” linguistic project. It was only seven years after the foundation of the PRC in 1949, when the country was still in severe poverty and its society was unstable. “汉语方音字汇” still keeps its status as a sort of bible among researchers of Chinese phonology. About two thousand years ago, in the era of Han dynasty, there was a great scholar named “杨雄”. He edited a dictionary called “方言 (dialects)” by himself, spending 27 years! The dictionary lists a lot of words from different dialects and compares them, and it was the only dictionary of this kind in Chinese history until the arrival of modern age. Unfortunately, “方言” doesn’t indicate pronunciations of listed words, since there was no “反切” (fan3 qie1) at that time, which is a method to represent the pronunciation of a character by using two other characters. As observed above, I think that making a good comprehensive dictionary is a respectable virtue (and a tradition) in Chinese society.
Posted on: Regional Accents Part I
April 22, 2008 at 6:35 AMHi kimlytton, Thanks for your confirmation. That was NOT my hallucination!! I feel relieved. It’s a good lesson, anyway.
Posted on: Regional Accents Part I
April 22, 2008 at 5:35 AMHi Chinesepod! I very much welcome this kind of lesson. Thank you! But I was a little confused when I listened to the lesson for the first time. Is it only me? John and Jenny explained as follows, 1) The first one is a Northerner. 北方人 2) The second people is from Taiwan, 台湾人 3) The last one is from Shanghai. 上海人 But actual order seems to be as follows, 1) 北方女人 2) 上海女人 3) 台湾男人
Posted on: Going to the Pharmacy
April 20, 2008 at 7:16 AMIn China, you can buy some antibiotic medicines at a pharmacy without a doctor’s prescription. “AT YOUR OWN RISK” is one of the most important principles in Chinese society. And to make matters “riskier”, not surprisingly, there are lots of fake and copycat medicines sold at pharmacies.
Posted on: Going to the Pharmacy
April 20, 2008 at 4:33 AMPharmacies are really flourishing here in China. There are incredibly numerous drug stores even in a small city, probably partly because seeing a doctor is usually very expensive for ordinary Chinese people (老百姓, lao3 bai3 xing4). “I can’t afford to get sick” is no joke here. 鼻塞 (bi2 se4) have a stuffy nose 咳嗽 (ke2 sou) to cough 打喷嚏 (da3 pen1 ti4) sneeze 流鼻涕 (liu2 bi2 ti4) have a running nose 发烧 (fa1 shao1) have a fever 发炎 (fa1 yan2) become inflamed 头疼 (tou2 teng2) have a headache 嗓子疼 (sang3 zi teng2) have a sore throat 上火 (shang4 huo3) is a very “Chinese” word, which generally means “suffer from excessive internal heat, with symptoms such as constipation and inflammation of the nasal and oral cavities”. Drinking cold beer might be more effective than taking medicine when you 上火.
Posted on: Ping Pong Nation
April 19, 2008 at 4:01 AMHi auntie68, There are also two names for 乒乓球 in Japanese, 桌球 (takkyu) and ピンポン(ping pong). The former one sounds formal and is often used just like 全国卓球選手権、卓球俱乐部. The latter sometimes implies “amateurish performance”. There is no 桌球 in 现代汉语词典, but I’ve found a lot on the Internet. According to some of my dictionaries, Chinese 乒乓 originally means “rattling and clattering sounds or high ringing sounds, such as hailstones drumming the roofs, gun shots, and sounds of fire crackers”. It’s good to know that people love hitting ping-pong balls instead of hitting people with a gun. p/s Thanks for seeing the video clips!!
Posted on: Fruit Salad
April 19, 2008 at 3:13 AMJudging from the lesson intro, it seems that fruit salad doesn’t come with mayonnaise in Western countries. I didn’t know that. Mayonnaise is a “magic” dressing material when you want to make food look Western-style, at least at my home in Japan. Mayonnaise 沙拉酱 (sha1 la1 jiang4) 色拉酱 (se4 la1 jiang4) 美奶滋 (mei3 nai3 zi1) 美乃滋 (mei3 nai3 zi1) I don’t know which of the last two is more authentic.
Posted on: 飞机怎么了？
April 23, 2008 at 6:42 AM罢工怠工等劳资争议战术都是共产主义创造的。 二战后日本社会中出现过几次的工人运动高潮， 许多所谓共产分子以舶来的思想理论指导推动 工人运动并促进组成工会而同时煽动劳资争议。 我还记得当时日本国有铁道公司经常进行罢工， 铁路罢工每次让全国广大日本人遭受严重影响。 从东航事件判断中国共产主义虽然已经有变质， 但看起来有些中国劳动人民还是不怕闹大罢工。 中国真不愧是剩余不多的马克思主义国家之一， 瘦死的骆驼比马大中国还保持着共产主义风格。