User Comments - chris

Posted on: A Short Haircut

I'm a crew-cut kind of guy.  But back in the UK I would always just ask for a "grade 2 all over".  In China I've been using the phrase "两毫米 (liǎng háo mǐ)" which literally means "2 millimetres".  Seems to be understood by hairdressers here.

(Apologies if this is already covered in the lesson, haven't had chance to listen to it yet).

Chris

Posted on: Construction

I'm one of those that goes against the CPod methodology and insists on doing all the lessons in chronological order, so I'm always somewhat behind! But actually I prefer this way since; (a) by the time I get to a lesson, all comments have already been made so I'm unlikely to miss any that come in after I've done the lesson (I'm up to about mid-January 2010 for intermediates now) and (b) whilst I do appreciate the concept is that you can dive into any lesson in the archive whenever you want, I do find that there is a certain chronological development within the lessons, e.g. new grammar structures coming in and then repeating themselves over next few lessons, which I really appreciate. I feel one risks missing this if the lessons are studied more haphazardly.

Also, I did experiment at one time with doing new lessons as they came out, but found that I just never got round to working back through my backlog of lessons, so my solution was just to work from oldest to newest.

Finally, I appreciate that my commenting on a brand new lesson here kind of contradicts what I wrote above, but I'm only doing so because Bodawei's comment caught my eye at the bottom of my dashboard page!

Thanks, Chris

Posted on: Computer Problems and Tech Support

Excellent, many thanks for that lujiaojie! Good to see my original sentence wasn't too far off! Chris.

Posted on: Various Speech Acts and 向 (xiang)

So, is anyone aware of an online resource that lists out all the verbs together with the preposition that best colocates with them?  I know exactly what Jen means when she says you just get a feeling for it - but it would still be nice to have an authoritative reference point if such thing exists - ideally, in addition to showing the best preposition colocation, also showing the other prepositions that could work, or else showing the prepositions that definitely are not allowed to colocate.  Chris.

Posted on: Computer Problems and Tech Support

Quite often I find that if I'm in a cafe with wifi and I can't connect to their network, a simple switch off and then switch on again of the cafe's router resolves the problem (think it's something to do with clearing caches or something.....). 

Anyway, my question is simply how can I ask the service staff to do this?  I usually try something like 麻烦你们把无线上网机，先关再开 "máfan nǐmen bǎ wuxianshàngwǎngjī xiān guān zài kāi". 

I know this is probably really bad chinese and grammar, but they always know what I mean.  Could I actually use this lesson's "chóngqǐ" here?  Any help appreciated, Chris.

Posted on: All About the Lesson Content

I also use the vertically folded paper approach from time to time (three columns; english, pinyin and hanzi). If I recall correctly, it was pearltowerpete that I first got the idea from about a year ago when he was still at CPod. I've only used it for single vocabulary words to date, and it is indeed a powerful tool. I like timothy's suggestion above to also use the approach for the sentences from the dialogues.

Posted on: New Year's Wishes

Final expansion sentence:

你能听出对话里的人是谁吗

I think this may have been covered in a QW some time ago, but my memory's a little rusty - can someone remind me why we need the question particle "ma5" at the end of the sentence, when the penultimate character is already the question word "shei2".  Would the sentence have the same meaning if we omitted the "ma5"?

Thanks, Chris

Posted on: Addressing Family Members

So, the moral of the story is that if you're planning on marrying a Chinese man or woman, make sure your potential spouse is an only-child and that his/her mum is also an only-child and dad is also an only-child ;-)

Posted on: Addressing Family Members

I think it's important to remember that there are probably a number of learners who don't have much interest in reading and writing Chinese, they just want to get some fluency in speaking and listening-comprehension (I know several non-native speakers who have achieved a most impressive fluency in speaking and listening but by their own admission only recognise a handful of characters and are able to write themselves an even smaller number of characters).

Up until recently, I was firmly in this camp. It's only now that my speaking and listening are finally seeing some improvement that I'm making some time to study the characters. Historically, I've just ignored all the comments that are purely Hanzi. But now, as Xiaophil mentioned above, I've installed a pop-up dictionary which I use to have a stab at the Hanzi comments. My only concern with this is that unless I know the commenter is native Chinese or CPod staff, then I'm not sure whether the grammar/hanzi are correct and don't want to potentially pick up bad habits. Just my two pence worth. Thanks, Chris

Posted on: Politely Declining an Invitation

I struggle with exactly the same listening comprehension challenge. But it goes wider - for example, when I'm in taxis these days I can generally pick up enough of female radio presenters' chat to get the gist of what they're saying, but I have no clue with the male presenters. Same goes for watching TV. My ears are getting more and more tuned into female chinese speech, but really lag on male speech.