User Comments - huan9

Posted on: The North Has Central Heating

mudphud,

I don't notice very much difference in mouth position between chu and qu. The major difference is that in chu my tongue is hiding in the back of my mouth, whereas in qu my tongue is forward in my mouth. When you say qu the tip of your tongue should touch the bottom row of teeth.

Posted on: Addressing Family Members

The vocabulary list has all the 表 cousins as "maternal" and the 堂 cousins as "paternal".

I agree with 堂 tang2 as paternal but your 姑姑's sons are also 表哥 and 表弟, right? So actually 表cousins are related through one or more women, whereas the 堂cousins are related through two males.

Traditionally the 堂 cousins are considered closer relatives than the 表cousins. Is that true today? Are the 堂cousins considered as close as siblings?

Posted on: Time Period Patterns with 末, 底, 初

Chinese and English speakers think of time differently.

In Chinese the past is 上 shang4 and the future is 下 xia3. It helps me to think of a calendar on the wall. Last week is above this week. Next week is below this week.

上个礼拜 last week

下次再来 Come again (next time).

But Chinese speakers also think of the future as behind (后 hou4) us and the past in front （前 qian2）of us.  

三年前 three years ago

后来 later, in the future

吃饭以后 after we eat

This gets very confusing for English speakers, because we look ahead to the future and back into the past.  For Chinese, I imagine myself standing still and the years marching past me from behind and into the past (ahead of me). In a way, it makes sense because you can't see into the future (It's behind you.) but you can see and remember the past, which now lies in front of you.

Posted on: Regional Accents Part II

I agree it would be good if the characters were bigger on the vocabulary list and expansion. I can change the text size on my screen to make it bigger but it's still too tiny to see all the strokes when I print of the vocabulary list. The Cantonese say laap saap for garbage. I suspect those are the same characters as what the Taiwanese people say (if the Taiwanese people were to use the characters). Hong Kong people also say 油炸鬼 (yau ja gwai) instead of 油条. There seem to be tons of these different word choices between Mandarin and Cantonese. To read a legend connected with this food, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Youtiao

Posted on: Baseball

I'm not much of an athlete when it comes to ball sports but my English students in China wanted to learn about American culture. So I taught them to play baseball using a fold-up umbrella and a wad of newspaper. Fun, but challenging in a classroom of 80+ students with the seats bolted to the floor. The last time I taught English in China I brought a Whiffleball and bat and the other foreign teacher and I taught the students baseball out on the sports field. We also got free tickets to watch some professional games in Chengdu. The Chengdu team played teams from Shanghai, Beijing, Guangdong and Tianjing. From this lesson I learned that the three third tones of 本垒打 are pronounced 223. Are three third tones always 223 or does it depend on the phrase? Can anyone give other examples of 333?

Posted on: Can you Speak Chinese?

Jenny Zhu, Referring to the first question posted, you said,我喜欢这课。I like this lesson. Do you mean you don't need a measure word? What is the measure word for kè? I have trouble learning measure words because they are not in every sentence that has the noun. So whenever you can include them somewhere in the lesson, it would help me. Even if it is only in the vocabulary list.

Posted on: Tone Rule: Changes for 'bu'

Carol, Another way to think of 不客气 is, (You do) not (have to be so) polite. Or, 你不要那么客气。

Posted on: Knitting a Scarf

Knitting and pearl milk tea are both popular in China, although not necessarily among the same crowd. I've only seen women knit, and usually older women. In the mid 90's I learned to knit from a Norwegian woman in China. So did some other international friends, both women and men. We were all English teachers there. When we traveled together we knit in the train stations or on public transport. Chinese people were very curious about foreigners. Fascinated by bearded men. But foreign bearded men who knit deserved a wide-eyed, open mouthed triple-long stare! The Chinese often told us, "男人不打毛衣。“ (Men don't knit.) The guys in our group would say,“是吗？“ (Is that so?) and keep on knitting. Suggestion: I try to speak Chinese to my daughter when I'm getting her dressed in the morning. And all day long she is constantly pulling her shoes and socks off, and hats and anything else she can manage. I'd like an intermediate lesson on which articles of clothing you chuān 穿and which you dài 戴. Are there other verbs for getting dressed too? In Mandarin how would you differentiate between wearing and putting on clothes? Just by context? If a child is one of the characters, I'd love it if you had a real child act in the dialog instead of a woman. By the way, the March newsletter said you are working on sites for other languages too besides Mandarin and Spanish. What other languages? Can we expect Cantopod soon? Auntie68, thanks for explaining the British wordplays in the Harry Potter vocabulary. The things you learn on Chinesepod!

Posted on: Bank Hours

I'm having the same trouble as Calkins. In the third exercise the audio doesn't play and strangely my Chinese input for typing is blocked. In the "Activity" window of Safari it reads "Java Script unsupported UI".

Posted on: The First Tone

To help remember the tones I like to think of 飞，爬，走，掉. I imagine the action and relate it to the tones. You can also do your 早操zǎocāo morning exercises to these verbs while acting out the four tones. 飞 fēi Fly Spread your arms wide and fly high like superman. 爬 pá Climb Climb a mountain or a ladder. 走 zǒu Walk / go Start standing up. Then take one giant step, dipping down a bit in the middle of it. End standing up. 掉 diào Drop / fall / down / away Stand a few feet away from the trashcan and toss something in. By the way, when are you guys going to start up Cantopod.com? I learned Cantonese as an elementary student when my family moved to Hong Kong. Then we came back to the US and I forgot most of it. I’d love to relearn it. Having learned Cantonese was mostly helpful to me when I started learning Mandarin. But I had trouble with some high frequency words. Yao means have in Cantonese and need/want in Mandarin. Yi means two in Cantonese and one in Mandarin. And if you say buy and sell in both languages you end up with four words all pronounced mai on four different tones! My, my, it confused the heck out of me.