User Comments - feilipu
feilipu
Posted on: 外交辞令 2/4 (Diplomat Series)
January 27, 2017 at 6:30 AMVery advanced due to the obscure antiquated vocabulary and references to classical texts.
Posted on: Learning to Drive a Car
August 8, 2016 at 3:42 PMHello, I haven't had time to learn Chinese recently and just wanted to compliment your website on a major improvement I've noticed. That you also print out the example sentences read out in the vocabulary review. Formerly I used to always spend ages in dictionaries searching for the vocabulary, now you have them all in pdf format, that makes things much easier for me.
Posted on: Saved by the Gong: Math class
April 7, 2008 at 8:18 PMOh, just listened to the dialogue and my questions are explained around minute 5.
Posted on: Saved by the Gong: Math class
April 7, 2008 at 7:19 PMSorry to expose my ignorance here, but what is the simple plus and minus? I guess 5 + 3 = 8 would be read as 五加三等于八？ What about minus? 负？And multiplication/division would simply be substituting 乘 and 除?
Posted on: 中国八大菜系
December 9, 2007 at 5:11 PM"Ever seen a better science paper using "wer im Glashaus sitzt"? Or "Eulen nach Athen tragen" as a verb like "der eulen-nach-athen-tragende Botschafter"?" Interesting point. Presumably very many ordinary vocabularies in that paper have not been covered on Chinesepod, without which one can't understand what is being written in it, still it's more important to cover the chengyu. Chinesepod could also cover all the Chinese legends, folk tales etc., which is another aspect of the language you hardly ever need for any practical puposes/use in day to day conversations.
Posted on: 中国八大菜系
December 9, 2007 at 3:01 PM"feilipu, Chengyus are "ordinary vocabulary" and exactly used that way - both in spoken and written language. Knowing them is absolutely crucial and the weight on them in the Advanced lessons is just right. In what regard do you thing Intermediate and Upper Intermediate lessons do not reflect "odinary Chinese conversations"?" I don't see how having half of the new vocabularies introduced in each advanced lesson puts a reasonable weight on chengyus. I often chat with Chinese people over the internet. These are young people who use ordinary Chinese and they practically never use any chengyus. This would be similar to having a Germanpod website, where in each lesson you introduce set phrases like "Eulen nach Athen tragen" or "wer im Glashaus sitzt, sollte nicht mit Steinen werfen" etc., while a lot of the basic vocabulary are still missing. The intermediate and upper intermediate lessons have a lot of English conversation and John is not a native speaker, so they are not fully reflective of conversations you will hear in China.
Posted on: 中国八大菜系
December 9, 2007 at 1:27 PM"Be careful about equating chengyu with idioms/ aphorisms in English... they're used A LOT more in Chinese. True, we often don't need them for making ourselves understood, but several friends of mine with very good Chinese have said that chengyu are the main hurdle when understanding spoken Chinese at a more-than-conversational but less-than-literary level." Yeah, but how about finding a reasonable ratio between ordinary vocabulary and chengyu. That doesn't seem to be given in a lot of the vocabulary presented for learning in the advanced lessons. My personal problem is that I still don't know a lot of the ordinary vocabulary and then you have loads of expressions coming up, which I will never use in a conversation anyway. Going to the intermediate lessons is also no solution, since you don't get ordinary Chinese conversations throughout the lesson.
Posted on: 中国八大菜系
December 8, 2007 at 3:46 PM"However it is sometimes hard to take new vocab away from the lessons because i dont attach importance to these chengyu." I think the use of Chinesepod is supposed to be as a practical tool for businesspeople, travelers, students etc. If you want to learn literary, written style Chinese, you can just as well use books for learning. I think the focus should be on practical daily oral use and the four letter compound words are hardly used in ordinary conversation, certainly not by foreigners who are learning Chinese as a second or third language.
Posted on: 中国八大菜系
December 8, 2007 at 2:28 PMBTW, I'm not saying there shouldn't be any four-character constructs. But a reasonable ratio would probably be about 1:10 or so between four-character and two-character words.
Posted on: Ridiculously Small Clothing!
September 10, 2017 at 10:32 AMYeah, sounded more like an advanced lesson to me, they speak very quickly in the dialogue and use a lot of literary/antiquated language.