User Comments - chris

Posted on: Sales: Understanding a Customer's Needs

I don't know about other poddies, but I found the second part of the following sentence particularly difficult to get my head around:-

在茫茫的人群当中，哪些人才是我可能把我的产品销售出去的对象

I am particularly struggling with the "cai shi" and the "ba" structure.

Posted on: Sending a Large File

agreed, I get most benefit out of the office/work environment lessons. lots of useful lexical chunks and vocab.

Posted on: The Mysteries of 而 Revealed

John, 你最近肯定疲于奔命，对不对？好像你现在主持所有程度的课！辛苦辛苦。

(John, recently you have definitely been up to your ears in work! It seems that you are now hosting all lesson levels! Keep up the good work.)

Posted on: Rich and Poor

I've never heard condominium used in the UK. Is it purely used in the States or do other English-speaking countries also use it? I'm more accustomed to using either apartment or flat. In my mind, apartment and flat are totally interchangeable, although I'll defer to other British English speakers to correct me if I'm wrong.

Posted on: Sales: Understanding a Customer's Needs

Full lesson transcript being worked on here:-

http://chinesepod.com/community/conversations/post/13135

Feel free to participate, review or ignore.

Posted on: Hamsters, Snakes, and Owls

Classic British 90's sitcom, takes me back! What a 榜样 to us all!

Posted on: For the Love of Pale Skin

That photo is fascinating. Good post RJ. Will try to look at the link as well if i get time.

Posted on: Internet Slang (Part Two)

Greg left a few weeks ago mate. I suspect they're still looking for a new host to pair up with David.

Posted on: Negotiating a Deadline

hehe, it probably comes across as more grand than it sounds mate. I should stress a couple of things:

(1) I am absolutely hopeless at reviewing - once I've ticked off a lesson I rarely if ever go back. The occasional time that I do, I found that I have forgotten all but the most common of the vocab and I also struggle to understand the dialogue again (even if I popback to the lesson a matter of days after studying it!). Part of my reviewing issue is that Cpod churns out new stuff so quickly that I'm always studying new material rather than going back to review. Also, whilst I've "studied" the vast majority of the Inter lessons in the archive, I have barely scratched the surface of UI so I still have lots of "new" UI material to get my teeth into.

(2) I by no means regularly study. Whilst the above is my standard approach to Cpod lessons, I certainly go in fits and starts. One month I may have lots of time and get through tens of lessons and transcripts and be active on the site. Then the next two months, I'll barely visit the site, let alone study or post anything, primarily due to work commitments. I have just had a 6 week period like that and today is my first day hitting the studying for a while.

Overall, I do find it personally helpful to have a set structure that I can apply to any lesson when I do manage to get round to studying again each time.

I've also posted this before, but I think I am somewhat unusual in that my speaking, reading and writing are way ahead of my listening ability. This is probably because of the focus I place on the handwriting above. Also, I do just find it incredibly hard to train my ears to translate quick enough at full speed. The annoying thing is that many times my interlocutor is not saying anything that I wouldn't recognise immediately if it was written down or if I had to say it - my ears just don't catch it and translate quick enough. A big problem for me.

Posted on: Negotiating a Deadline

Pretz, I neglected to mention that I do also listen to the lesson itself (between steps 2 and 3 above) and as I listen to the lesson, I annotate my handwritten dialogue and vocab from steps 1 and 2 with any pertinent points made by the hosts.

The time taken varies a lot, not just between levels (I and UI are my focus at moment), but also within levels. Also, if I've had a long break from studying - as is the case today - then it takes longer because my hand has got rusty in terms of drawing the characters. I can now basically handwrite 75-80% of Intermediate lesson characters without needing to look at the PDF, i.e. I can handwrite them from memory. After a few minutes, my "hand memory" is back and it's almost automatic. The remaining 20-25% I have to carefully copy from the PDF. For UI lessons, it takes much longer as there is so much more new vocab.

All in all, a moderately challenging Inter lesson will take me around 90-120mins to thoroughly go through all of my above steps. UI lessons can take anywhere from 2-4 hours - and often I do them in stages, not all in one sitting.

From time to time I will also do an entire lesson transcript. For Inter lessons this will take an extra 60-90mins since I'm at the stage now where I don't need to rewind so much. For UI, much longer since I rewind every 30sec (or even every 2 secs!) over and over as i try to capture exactly what is said.