User Comments - huibert

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huibert

Posted on: Stargazing
March 9, 2008 at 4:58 PM

水金地火木土天王海王 after listening two times, it wasn't too difficult, except for the jin1 which I heard as jing1...

Posted on: Stargazing
March 9, 2008 at 4:40 PM

Can anyone repeat (in characters) that Chinese mnemonic for star names?

Posted on: Turbulence
December 8, 2007 at 2:38 PM

Is it because this dialogue was written by a woman that the male in it is (once again) such a loser? Or is it just a fact that men are simply weaker? Anyway, great lesson with useful words and expressions. Also reminds me of some heavy turbulence between Beijing and Nanjing. My wife had not even noticed...

Posted on: Cold Will Kill You
October 31, 2007 at 3:11 PM

Nice lesson, not too difficult, good stuff for my level. The discussion about 'cold' is interesting too, though not based on solid research, I fear. I remember a discussion on cold drinks in Spain, some 25 years ago, when the habit of drinking ice in your coke was also developing there. One of the consequences: an increase in stomach diseases, including cancer. Drinking ice is not something our body was designed for and the Chinese used to understand this. The young want to have Western diseases and it seems they are being successful!

Posted on: Motivational Speaker
October 27, 2007 at 10:42 AM

According to John, 瓶颈 has a broader meaning in Chinese than in English. This may be true for American English, but in my (British influenced) English, the broader meaning is totally acceptable, 'Oxford Concise' says 'anything obstructing an even flow of production etc.' One of the nice things about Chinesepod is that I am learning a new kind of English here. I learned the word 'cheesy' today, and got used to John's use of 'kind of like' constructions which cannot be found in my grammar books... Learning American English is much easier than learning Chinese, by the way. I liked this 'cheesy' lesson very much and am looking forward to hearing more of this kind of material.

Posted on: Missing Persons in Jizhou
October 7, 2007 at 7:44 AM

Nice lesson! Hope you find a sufficiently complex and interesting plot to make this a series.

Posted on: Motivational Speaker
October 7, 2007 at 7:42 AM

reacting to user28880: I've got the same problem, this lesson won't download to my iTunes, What's wrong?

Posted on: Death by Ninja
October 1, 2007 at 4:47 PM

I found this ending too artificial. I never liked this Peter with his strange accent and un-Chinese sentence rhythm, but there would have been more natural ways to remove him from the series. Still I find that we need a new series on business, including some technical management terms like market share, customer satisfaction, business unit and change management. Without this foreign accent however. On the other hand, keep the humour.

Posted on: City Stats
September 11, 2007 at 7:04 AM

Despite mobility, hometown has a lot of meaning for many Dutch people. Most people identify with a region, a dialect, a lifestyle. In colloquial language, there is a different word for someone 'born in the Hague' (Hagenees) and someone 'just living there' (Hagenaar), for example. I live in the province of Brabant, but I am not a 'Brabander', since I do not speak with the Brabant accent and I was not raised as a Catholic.... So I predict that also in China, this 老家 feeling will not easily disappear with growing mobility.

Posted on: Experiencing Agricultural Life
July 5, 2007 at 11:37 AM

Though still too difficult for me, I think this natural speech is an important ingredient of good lessons. However, don't try to do too many things at the same time: learn new words, learn new constructions, learn new cultural patterns and learn to increase listening speed. Good teaching material focusses on one aspect and does that well. So, next to this quickly spoken natural language you still need scripted material with relatively artificial language to teach certain constructions and expressions. At a certain point you even need old-fashioned grammar... Maybe you could create three types of lessons: listening exercises, vocabulary enrichment, and grammatical exercise. Or is this too structured?