User Comments - chris

Posted on: A Creepy Guy

Pretz, it seems to me that nowadays most of the (active on the comments board) subscribers are Brits or Aussies rather than Americans!

Posted on: A Creepy Guy

Interesting you say that RJ, for some reason i always get Stiller and Sandler confused! I generally agree with you on these two, however Zoolander is in my view an exception and actually rather amusing. It's also got owen wilson in it if memory serves.

Posted on: Noisy Eater

Enjoyed this lesson, thanks team.  I agree there is something about the sound of slurping that just really pushes my buttons.  For some people, it's nails down a blackboard, for me it's the sound of slurping.  I just have to keep reminding myself it's a cultural difference and gradually learn to embrace it (either that, or just plug in my headphones!).  Which reminds me, another pet-peeve in restaurants - people who play music loudly on their phones or watch some tv/movie loudly while eating, seemingly oblivious to the common courtesy of using their headphones........rant over.

Posted on: Language Power Struggle

Hi stavros, I know where you're coming from. However, up until a certain level I don't think a teacher can avoid using at least some English. That level will be different for different people, but at Newbie, for example, I think my progress would have been much slower if my teacher only spoke Chinese. Now I'm at Intermediate, I fully appreciate my teacher insisting on no English.

Posted on: Lili and Zhang Liang 7: A Guy's Advice on Women

I remember one of the poddies posting a series of about a dozen "easy" intermediates on a thread about a year ago, i.e. good bridge lessons between Ele and Intermediate. I will try to dig it out and post a link.

In terms of the number of each level you are meant to do before moving to the next, I wouldn't overly rely on that measure. According to my home page, I have now studied 261 Intermediate lessons, but I still regularly struggle with the lesson dialogue the first few listens through and pretty much never follow the entire thing first time. That might just mean I'm not an effective studier and I certainly don't review previously studied lessons anywhere near as much as I should. However, I find I can follow the hosts' discussion pretty easily at Intermediate and UI. It is just the lesson dialogues themselves I struggle with. Bizarre.

Posted on: The Tea Scam

Great analysis and an insightful way of thinking about this aspect of the cultural differences between east and west. Having lived here for about 6 years now, with a Chinese wife and family-in-law, I can relate to a lot of the points made above.

Posted on: What Does This Word Mean?

Would you believe I only just came across this word "nian" a couple of weeks ago for the first time. Tingyun had recommended on another post a couple of books to help beef up reading comprehension (Chinese Elementary Readers, or something like that) and I bought them. In one of the early chapters they had this word, nian. I thought that maybe it is a somewhat outdated word, since the books were first published in 1989 just as China was opening up.

Posted on: Where Are the Seat Belts?

I guess it's just the conservatism of older age catching up with me mate. I'm not as much of a risk-taker as I used to be!

Posted on: Where Are the Seat Belts?

I have recently started sitting in the front passenger seat more often, for this very reason.  In my experience, there is little point in asking the driver to dig out the back seat seatbelts.  So many people take taxis now in downtown Shanghai that he will simply drive off and find the next, less fussy, fare within seconds.

Posted on: Addressing Women

baba, I actually deleted my original post once i saw your and hiew's had also disappeared (the little joke play on fruit words made no sense without your and hiew's posts!).