User Comments - frances

Posted on: I'm pregnant!

wchan,

Amber 最近说他自己的中文名字：here.

(Amber recently said what her Chinese name is.）

Posted on: Riding the Subway

That was a great video. I'm impressed at how well the cameraman managed to keep Jiaojie and Connie in view in that throng. The move during 上车 was especially cool.

I thought that the most of the terms were very clear, though I also knew most of them. Of the ones that I did not know:

硬币 was unmistakable.

刷卡 was pretty clear, though I recognized the word 卡, which might have been slightly tricky otherwise - since that was a 票 when Connie bought it.

扶手 was as clear as it could be. I recognized 手 and knew that this was not the generic word for pole, but I naturally could not know what other things might be 扶手. But, lo! I come to ChinesePod.com and the question has already been asked and answered! Thanks, Amber!

Posted on: Riding the Subway

henning, it's a "ticket barrier", or "turnstile". "Turnstile" also applies when you don't need to pay.

Posted on: Come on up!

Amber, this is probably not an easy thing to do, but given that dropped tones on second syllables are often optional, it would be nice to eventually have exercises that would accept either answer. Consistency is better than inconsistency, generally, but marking a correct answer wrong is confusing.

Posted on: Street Food Buffet

bababardwan,

That's great! 太空 (too empty or too much vastness)! What a perfect word for space.

Posted on: Lesson Preview, New Team Member

illyria,

That's really not very unusual. People studying more than one foreign language, even when the languages are very different, often swap words and phrases between them. I don't drop Spanish words into my Chinese anymore, but my Spanish has gotten rusty and occasionally comes out in Chinese. So far this hasn't happened while I've been speaking with anyone who understands Chinese. It's often good for a laugh, though not on test papers.

In high school I used to regularly use Spanish on my Latin tests and Latin on my Spanish tests. The languages are similar enough that you can often look at a phrase and not be able to use any litmus test to tell logically which it belongs to.

Posted on: Farm Animals

bigsmith62, You need measure words in order to count things. If you were refer to "two cows" or even "a cow" you would need to use a measure word. Because this dialogue never specifies a number, even vaguely, there's no need for a measure word. It's not clear whether the speaker was saying "That's a cow" or "Those are cows".

We do the same thing in English with certain nouns (called "uncountable" or "mass" nouns). I can talk about "sand" without a measure word, but if I want to specify quantity I need to use one. (e.g. "This is sand", "This is one grain of sand", "This is two buckets of sand", etc...) I can't say "this is a sand", because "a" implies the number one. I found the whole thing easier to understand once I realized that all Chinese nouns are what we would call "uncountable" in English.

Posted on: Don't Never Say Never

Thanks, Amber! I guess the meaning should be clear from context.

Posted on: Don't Never Say Never

This lesson discusses "从来不"/cónglái bù, and "从来没"/cónglái méi, but I wonder if there shouldn't be a third form mentioned, "从来别"/cónglái bíe. As in:

Never say never: 从来别说“从来不”。Cónglái bíe shūo "cónglái bù".

Is this even correct?

Posted on: Street Food Buffet

Pinkjeans, I had the same impression. I got the impression from this book, Swallowing Clouds. The decription of the book on Amazon begins, "Wonton, which transliterates in Chinese as "swallowing clouds," gives title to this delightful mix of Chinese etymology, cooking, and culture..."

I never bothered to analyze the claim, but now that I look at it, it does not seem to be correct. Maybe 雲吞/云吞 really is the Cantonese term.

edit: I think that's almost certainly it. The Cantonese pronunciation of 云吞 is wan4tan1.

... yup. Here's the reference.