User Comments - jen_not_jenny

Posted on: Lots of Musical Instruments

Give it a try! Who says you have to be brilliant at a language to have a go at translating a song??

Posted on: A Rarely Washed Car

Where I come from, we name our cars. When I was a teenager, my friend used to drive around his mom and dad's beat-up old station wagon, affectionately called "Old Bill." Only after he (this car was definitely male; we assign gender, too) was thus named did my friend realize that he could give his car (an Oldsmobile) a nametag by removing the S, the M, the second O, and the E from the back door.

Posted on: Adjectives with 是 (shi)

Hey Baba,

Late reply, sorry! I think the most common way I've heard 2nd and 3rd tones emphasized is by slooowing down and enunciating the tone even more. The first example that comes to mind is something like:

这里不可以抽烟。zhèlǐ bù kěyǐ chōuyān.

可以啊！kěyǐ a! (with this 可 pronounced slowly and deliberately).

Posted on: Picking Up a Friend at the Airport

I'm sure everyone is different, but my closest Chinese friend leaves the motor running and doesn't even get out of the car. Awkward little half-hug/shoulder pat, always initiated by me, hehe! (It's OK, I know she loves me. Deep down.)

Posted on: Sign Language in China

Fascinating read. Have you found your full-time Chinese teaching dream job yet?

Posted on: Sign Language in China

My personal experience with the few deaf people I've met in China is that they can actually lipread (is speechread the correct term, menglelan? that's a new one for me) my atrocious Chinese remarkably well. Perhaps it's because the main atrocity factor in my spoken Chinese is my slaughtering of the tones...;)

Posted on: Sign Language in China

Is it? I, J, P, Q, S and T look different...could there be regional differences in pinyin fingerspelling as well?

The really cool pinyin "letter" signs, the ones for ZH, CH, SH, and NG are at the bottom of any chart, so I guess they wouldn't be visible in the avatar...on a completely unrelated side note, I wonder if a Cantonese 手语 speaker would think it a funny pun if I signed "我 + 姓 + (pinyin fingerspelling sign for NG)."

Maybe not. My humor seldom translates.

Posted on: Sign Language in China

It looks like the ASL alphabet, with letters G to Z pictured, although the T sign is unfamiliar to me...

Posted on: Surfing the Web Chinese Style

Hi kuizhou,

You can add words to your flashcards by left-clicking on the word you want in the example sentences in the dialogue tab.

Glad you found this lesson particularly useful!

Posted on: Second-hand Bicycle

I don't think you're going to impress many Chinese people by telling them about your secondhand ANYTHING!

It's funny, even expat culture varies from city to city...in Mexico, and also in Guangzhou, my expat friends and I would compete to see who could spend the least on stuff...not in Shangers!! I don't dare tell anyone how much I pay for my ghetto-fab anything! They'd laugh!

I agree with bweedin, too...John and David (Xu Zhou) make a great all-guy teaching team!