User Comments - kttang

Posted on: Calling an Ambulance

Actually, in any language, when people speak fast, their pronunciation is different from when they speak slowly, especially in commonly used phrases. In your native language, you probably don't notice because you automatically adjust for it. An example from American English that non-native speakers have a terrible time with: can and can't. In normal conversation, the sentence "I can go" sounds like "I kng go" and "I can't go" like "I kae go" (I can't type the last one--the 'n' gets merged with the vowel so that it's nasalized, and the 't'turns into a glottal stop, like in the middle of 'uh-oh'. My tongue never touches the front of my mouth where I would make an n/t sound. But the vowel is always the same as in careful speech, whereas for 'can', the vowel pretty much disappears.)

Incidentally, I also heard 'jiu jiu' instead of 'jiao jiu'--but I'm guessing a native Chinese speaker wouldn't. At least, Connie thinks they sound at most 'a bit similar'. It's a good chance for us to adjust our listening :)

Posted on: A Phone Call to the Moving Company

For those who are interested, a pack rat is the name of a rodent, native to North America, that builds its nest out of lots of different materials and keeps adding to it with whatever it can find.  For those of you who can access Wikipedia, there's lots of info there.  Americans use it as a metaphor for someone who doesn't ever get rid of anything.  I never realized this one wasn't universal :)

Posted on: Toilet Types

As long as we're on the topic, could someone enlighten me a little more about 卫生纸 (wèishēngzhi3)?  When I was first in China, I was told not to flush toilet paper, and so I didn't.  On a more recent visit, we decided that at a nice hotel geared towards business travelers, they would surely warn you if you weren't supposed to flush it, so we flushed it, and nothing bad happened, as best as we could tell.  So was this a bad idea?  And if it wasn't, how do you know where you can and can't flush the toilet paper?

Posted on: Changes on ChinesePod

@helenhelen

Yes! I would definitely consider a subscription option that's intermediate in cost and content between basic and premium.  For me, what would be helpful is all the audio (vocab review, dialogue) and the expansion.  However, I doubt I will pay for the premium to get it because I have my own flash card program that I am very pleased with (no audio but the audio didn't work here for me anyway) and I probably wouldn't use the exercises and the tests (even if I wanted to, the font is too small to comfortably read on my computer).

Incidentally, I'm not subscribing now because at the moment my life is way too crazy to be able to spend much time studying, but I envision subscribing for at least 6 months in the future.  I do think it's fair to be asked to pay for the content here.

Posted on: Chinglish in Reverse and University Culture

Totally agree with crazykitty about guanxi--there's just no good word for this in English.