User Comments - darrencook
darrencook
Posted on: I Want This
September 03, 2008, 10:14 AMZhe vs. Zhei???
xiaohu wrote:
When Zhe and Na are followed by a measure word the pronunciation becomes "Zhei" and "Nei", but more often than not the only people who even say "Zhe" and "Na" aren't native Mandarin speakers. The Chinese people often times almost exclusively use "Zhei" and "Nei"...
Unfortunately for us easily-confused newbies the other people who use Zhe ("juh") instead of Zhei ("jay") are the ChinesePod staff who record the vocabulary and expansion sentences. (Even when followed by ge both the pinyin and the pronunciation are zhe.)
Does anyone want to disagree with Xiaohu? If not it seems ChinesePod are not keeping their promise to teach us the Mandarin that people actually use ;-).
Posted on: Morning at the Office
September 02, 2008, 05:19 AMOne of the expansion sentences is:
你晚上要来吗？
(ni wanshang yao lai ma) meaning "Are you coming this evening?"
What is the "yao" doing there? Does it mean the same as 你晚上来吗？ Or, is the actual meaning more like: "Do you want to come (e.g. out with us) this evening?"
Posted on: Wait!
July 16, 2008, 04:40 AMChengye-sensei wrote: "I can only say that the lower, the less commonly used".
I just read that list in my grammar book last night; here is how it defined the difference:
A跟B (gen1) [northern dialect colloq.]
A和B (he2) [neutral]
A同B (tong2) [southern dialect colloq.]
A与B (yu3) [formal and classical]
Posted on: Sightseeing at Tiananmen
June 30, 2008, 06:11 AMTwo of the expansion sentences are:
车一直往前开。
(Keep driving straight.)
直往东走。
(Keep walking east.)
Why is 车 in the first one? I asked a Chinese friend and he explained it stops it being a command; but the English is a command (perhaps to a taxi driver), so is the English wrong? He suggested the meaning is more like: "The car is going straight"?
Posted on: I Want This
September 05, 2008, 01:01 AMHi Kenny168, Thanks for the reply.
"zhe yi" may be the etymology, but it does not seem to be a simple contraction. E.g. you can say "Zhei yi ge" and "Zhei liang ge".
FWIW, my hard-core grammar book says 这 is always pronounced zhe4 when used as a demonstrative pronoun on its own. When followed by a measure it is "also pronounced zhei4 by many speakers".
zhei4 also seems to be colloquial; I've been told that a news-reader would not use it for instance.
I guess I should be prepared to hear it either way, and (at my level) using either won't matter.