User Comments - cinnamonfern
cinnamonfern
Posted on: Too Young to be Dating
August 16, 2011 at 6:24 PMIt depends on the girl, but probably they are more likely to be directly confrontational. "I can hang out with whoever I want! You don't own me!" Of course, I wasn't one of those girls. :)
Posted on: Punctuation Marks
August 10, 2011 at 1:18 PMThat's called a tilde (til-day) in English. Its official use is to mean approximately, such as: the bag weighs ~30 kg. (The bag weighs approximately 30 kg.) I think in Chinese it is called 波浪号 (bōlànghào) - or "wave symbol". I like it!
Posted on: Punctuation Marks
August 9, 2011 at 2:15 PMThanks for answering my question! I was curious about Chinese punctuation after the important role of the 冒号 in 《Detective Li and the Mysterious Text Message》. I realized I didn't know any of the punctuation names！ :) And I rather enjoy the 书名号。
Posted on: Chinese Folk Medicine
August 2, 2011 at 3:44 AM（fēngyóujīng) - essential balm
I never knew what this was. Before I started learning Chinese, a friend's mom gave me this because I had a headache. I wasn't too sure about the strange green liquid, but I put some on my temples...Be warned - it burns!! (Maybe it's all the menthol...) I'm not sure that it actually cured my headache so much as distracted me from it slightly with another kind of pain.
Posted on: Chinese Liquor
July 29, 2011 at 2:18 PMMy friend told me that originally people would bow/kneel their fingers as if they were actually a person kneeling on the ground. Eventually it morphed into tapping. Kind of neat!
Posted on: Tone Rule: Changes for 'bu'
July 29, 2011 at 2:19 AMHi Andrea, You're right - you can't switch to pinyin in the dialogue and expansion sections. But you can still read the pinyin. Just hover your mouse cursor over the word you are interested in and a pop-up will show the pinyin and the English definition. I hope this helps you!
Posted on: Car Decorations and Bumper Stickers
July 28, 2011 at 11:04 PM哈哈。 河北的车没有猴子上面。 那些猴子上香港的车。
Posted on: Car Decorations and Bumper Stickers
July 28, 2011 at 8:24 PMOne of my high points of traveling in China was driving my good friend's father-in-law's car on Spring Festival with it's little picture of Mao hanging from the rearview mirror. I got to drive because my friend and her husband didn't know how to drive a stick shift (aka - manual transmission).
Posted on: A Tearful Farewell and Warm Welcome
June 25, 2011 at 4:33 PMThanks for all the hard work Jason! You'll definitely be missed! Best wishes on your new studies in Taiwan.
And welcome to the team Greg! I'm sure you'll do a fantastic job! 加油！
Posted on: Translation Tools
August 20, 2011 at 2:28 PMBefore I found some of the online dictionaries, I would reverse translate on Wikipedia. (Look up a page you want in English and then go to the bottom of the left side bar and click 中文.) I often use this for plant names because Wikipedia usually has pictures and I can verify that the translation is right. That's how I learned the Chinese name for rhubarb - 大黄. I think this is also good for translation of movie names. The downside is they don't always have pages in Chinese for everything you might want to find.