User Comments - frances

Posted on: Come on up!

greggs, you are correct. You would never say "Wǒ bú dào le".

Also, if you are still planning to go, it would be better to include "hái", meaning "still" or "yet", as Jenny did in her example. "Wǒ hái méi dào" would be "I haven't arrived yet".

Posted on: Come on up!

@bababardwan,

One of the common way tones can change is in the formation of multi-syllable words. For two syllable words, the tone of the second syllable is less emphasized than that of the first - to the point where it may sometimes be dropped. This is a tendency which varies regionally, and the second syllable tone may not be de-emphasized if there is possibility of confusion. I've noticed too, that when I see a citation that indicates a tone is dropped on a second syllable, the next citation I see for the same word may not reflect a tone drop. Rather than worrying over this, I try to take the inconsistency as a sign that I will be understood as long as my pronunciation is somewhere on the spectrum.

For three syllable words, the tone of the first syllable is generally most emphasized and that of the second syllable least emphasized. I think this is the kind of thing better learned unconciously through imitation than by trying to analyse levels of tone emphasis while talking.

Posted on: Come on up!

@Chapman3us,

I was surprised to see your statement that "niner" was created to distinguish from the German "nein", not from the English "five". After some Googling, it looks like everyone agrees that it was created for spoken clarity, but the specifics are a matter of active debate. I found sources unequivocally stating each theory. I'm personally more tempted to believe the theory that it was invented to distinguish from the number "five", as this seems like a more likely cause of confusion ("nine" and "five" being the same language and both numbers). Surprisingly, the dictionaries that I checked, including the OED, don't even weigh in, recognizing "niner" only as a noun. Very interesting...

Posted on: Come on up!

I think that the 幺(yāo) is used for clarity when reciting digits. If you can't hear well, 一(yī) could be mistaken for 七(qī), 7, because the two numbers rhyme. I think it's similar to the reason the American military people (in movies, I don't know about real life), sometimes say "niner" instead of "nine". "Nine" and "five" have the same vowel sound, and could be mixed up if someone can't hear a speaker clearly.

Posted on: Come on up!

In China, how many flights above ground level is the fifth floor? In the U.S., the ground floor and the first floor of a building are usually the same floor, so the fifth floor is only four flights up. In many other places, I know that the first floor is one flight above the ground floor. Which system is used in China?

Posted on: Making Negative Comparisons

Tvan, You're correct. Connie corrected that sentence to add the 的. (Scroll up a few posts, she highlighted her correction in orange, so you should be able to find it easily.) Also, just a couple weeks ago there was a QW on when you can imply possessives (The My Minefield). That was a very helpful episode!

That leads to a follow up question, though. Can you imply possessives in this structure, as in:

我爷爷比你苍老。(Wǒ yèye bǐ nǐ cānglǎo.)

Or would I need the 的 after 你 for clarity? Hmm... looking at it now, I think this question definitely says "My grandfather is older than you," not, "My grandfather is older than yours." So I guess you would need the 的, but will it sound awkward?

Posted on: Making Negative Comparisons

@light: Try this site: http://lost-theory.org/ocrat/reaj/ You can copy and paste the unreadable text onto this site, and they will convert your text into a simple image. I tried it with JP's nice explanation above... and it worked great! I tried a few simplified and traditional characters, and it seemed okay with it all. (The image that it builds seems to have fixed height and width that are both pretty big, so I did have to click the image each time in my browser to get it to display full size.)

Posted on: Making Negative Comparisons

比 bǐ

Posted on: Making Negative Comparisons

@light: Geez. Your company doesn't give you enough access on your work computer to install fonts? I don't think I could take it!

Posted on: At the Hair Salon

It's always a risk with an image-based lesson that learners will not interpret the visual clues correctly. When I tried a few lessons of Rosetta Stone I found that to be a really serious problem. I remember seeing a photo of a white flag with a red bird on it. Did the Chinese word attached to the image mean "flag", "bird", "red", ...? I would not have realized that the house in their photo of "old house" was supposed to be old if I didn't recognize the Mandarin.

These video lessons seem to make things quite a bit clearer so far by use of themes. Many of the words in each lesson include the same characters, helping learners to recognize patterns. A viewer may recognize one, two or all three of the characters in "shampoo", and thus have a clue to the meaning. In the traffic lesson, when the bicycle was pointed out, even if a viewer has not noticed the pattern that the vehicle words have all ended in 车, they will surely have noticed at least that all the terms in the lesson were vehicles.

Though all of this makes correct identification of the terms in the videos more likely, it still follows that you shouldn't memorize a new word unless you're pretty sure you're learning the right definition!