User Comments - everett

Posted on: Where is the Supermarket?

As a few others have pointed out, "Great Wall" (Chang Cheng) in the expansion is pronounced "gong si" ("company") in the audio file. I'd worry more about this sort of thing confusing newbies. Proofreading/listening (with care and attention) may be time-consuming, but it's time well spent IMO.

Posted on: Two Tough Ladies

"berate" for ma4 ?

Posted on: Tone Change Rule: Yi '一'

About diyi, could the reason that yi doesn't change tone be because yi is emphasized? The yi slot in the expression diyi could be substituted with any other number, and therefore that slot is the focus, or what you really have to hear to understand the word and distinguish it from similar words. This emphasis brackets it off from the following word. Or perhaps it's the other way around: bracketing yi from the following word is what creates the needed sense of emphasis.

Posted on: The Pen and Paper Mystery

Audio review, vocab section:

"Measure word..... zhi1"

a little later

"Measure word.... zhang1"

How are we supposed to guess right? Couldn't you say "measure word used with pen" or "measure words as in a _sheet_ of paper"?

The English explanations of Chinese words in the Vocabulary tab aren't always designed to work for translation the other way around, yet they're getting used that way.

This may sound like making a big deal over nothing, but why record exercises that can't be done?

Anyway, apart from this niggle, thanks for all the gadzillion great things you're doing that might get passed over without comment, like saying "_written_ character". There's an impressive stringency to the lesson contents these days. Thanks!

Posted on: How to Say "and" in Chinese

I''ve got chipmunks in the embedded player, no chipmunks in the two downloadable files (radio/full quality).  I'm using Firefox

Really good lesson btw! Is the dialogue section new? Great addition, one I've been hoping for for a while.

Posted on: Chinese Idol

I don't know much about it but I get the feeling it would be natural to call a taxi driver shifu but a bit unnatural to call him laoshi (unless maybe he was a moonlighting nuclear physicist or somthing).

Anywhere in the vicinity of the truth?

Posted on: Grammar Lesson

Thanks Pete. Not to belabour the point, but another pair would be really/very, that could be kept to zhen1/hen3 respectively.

As before it's only an issue because the same glosses can be used for translating from the English back into the Chinese, as in the expansions and on the audio review.

Posted on: Grammar Lesson

Chinese Pod, you guys are the best. The best! Please indulge me a bit here...

In the expansion sentences we have:

电影几点开始？(dian4 ying3 ji3 dian3 kai1 shi3 ?)
When does the movie start? 1 (When does the movie start?)

Of course this translation isn't wrong, but it would be helpful for us learners if you consistently translated 几点 (ji3 dian3) as "what time" and saved "when" for shenme shihou. The same would go for other similar cases.

This actually matters because the expansions can also be used for practising translating from English back to Chinese. Also, the audio review uses the English versions of the expansion sentences to prompt the listener. The above translation will lead to users getting the wrong answer. It's not the end of the world, but it would be cool if at least the most high frequency set of these distinctions were kept consistent.

Of course you will often need to depart from the literal Chinese for the English translation to be idiomatic. I'm all for that. But in many sentences like this the literal version works.

Posted on: Where Did You Go?

If I remember right, Chinese Pod used to mostly use nali and seems to be changing to Beijing dialect more and more. There seem to be a lot more other er-words nowadays as well.

I'm not sure if this is related but the way the speakers used to pronounce words I had a hard time hearing the difference between you/yao or shou/shao. They seem to distinguish them more clearly (to my ear at least) than before. Is this another north/south thing?

Posted on: A Mouse Upstairs

Good to hear. Thanks for the quick response!

I haven't seen mice, but where I was at in July there were eight-inch centipedes (蜈蚣  wúgōng). They moved like something out of the Matrix. The cat braved their poison and hunted them, not having much else than bugs and worms to eat.