User Comments - delawaredavid
delawaredavid
Posted on: Designing the New Apartment 3
March 11, 2010 at 3:41 AMI think the do-it-yourself culture in the US developed mostly because the labor costs to renovate a house can be very expensive. In China/Asia you can hire squadrons of people on the cheap to do that work for you. Its a question of time vs. money. If you can pay people very little money to paint your house, there is no reason to spend three weekends dripping paint on yourself. Especially in a culture where people are being asked to work crushing amounts of overtime these days....
Posted on: Starting a Company in China
December 17, 2009 at 7:08 AMI'm just wondering if Mr. Pan in the dialogue is really a foreigner, or is a Chinese person that does a good "ABC" accent. Some of my coworkers (in Taiwan) are quite good at this, and I find it very amusing, especially when we are at at dinner and they pretend that their Chinese is not "standard".
Posted on: Applying for a Loan
December 11, 2009 at 2:47 AM@bodawei
I think chinesepod does a good job in some of their lessons at hinting around at some of the corruption and fraud issues that we all know are rife in chinese society.
But for Jenny to get on at the end of the podcast and explain to us that "ohh this definately wouldn't happen in China" is completely ridiculous and insulting. This absolutely WOULD happen. Sure it might not happen exactly like where a person walks into a bank, meets a manager for a first time and starts handing out red envelopes. Instead it would likely involve a round of golf, fancy hotel and dinners, some gifts AND maybe a red envelope.
Posted on: Applying for a Loan
December 10, 2009 at 3:50 AMJenny, there is no way you can believe that your society doesn't work like this. All of the people I've talked to strongly believe that in China (and Taiwan) that this shady red-envelope system permeates every level of society. Including parents gives gifts to teachers to pay more attention to their kids while the poor kids get completely ignored in class. Shameful.
Posted on: Love Tangle 5: The Mistress
November 19, 2009 at 3:34 AMJenny is confusing seduce and seductive. Seductive can have a sexy connotation in english, while 'to seduce' will almost always be used in a negative situation, like gouyin I suppose.
Posted on: Making the Move from China
May 29, 2014 at 9:59 AMWhy would you want to learn to speak Chinese with a Beijing accent ahmadayaz? That's like a non-native English speaker learning to speak English with a Boston accent - which would be ridiculous.