User Comments - lechuan

Posted on: 小沈阳

samzhangshimin,

True, But this is a Media Lesson. It's the most challenging level here at chinesePod (more challenging than Advanced).

Posted on: Pregnancy Series 2: Pregnancy House Ar-rest

An old friend of mine taught me a saying that has come in handy many times: After laying out both sides of the issue, "Let's agree to disagree!" :) Instant solution to disagreement, especially with paying customers.

There IS a good place where this discussion could be:

http://chinesepod.com/lessons/attitudes-toward-religion/discussion

Posted on: Pregnancy Series 2: Pregnancy House Ar-rest

Leeht, some clever mnemonics, they will definitely help me to memorize these characters!
 
But if we are going to use religious parallels to try and draw conclusions about the character's *origin*, then we need to look at the *ancient* forms of the characters, not the modern forms.
 
For example, the right side of "福" in ancient forms is a basket or vessel. The stylization to one-mouth/man-field/garden came much later to the modern forms.
 
http://www.internationalscientific.org/CharacterASP/CharacterEtymology.aspx?characterInput=%E7%A6%8F&submitButton1=Etymology
 
The original form of "船" has a vessel on the left and the 㕣 is pronunciation mnemonic, also found in 鉛 (lead-metal), and 沿 (along). The 八 in the phonetic had the original meaning of divide/remnant. Only in the more modern forms has it come to mean 8.
 
http://www.internationalscientific.org/CharacterASP/CharacterEtymology.aspx?characterInput=%E8%88%B9&submitButton1=Etymology
 
http://www.internationalscientific.org/CharacterASP/CharacterEtymology.aspx?characterInput=%E5%85%AB&submitButton1=Etymology
 
As explained previously, 我 was borrowed to mean I/me in modern forms. It originally was some kind of field tool or rake.
 
http://www.internationalscientific.org/CharacterASP/CharacterEtymology.aspx?characterInput=%E6%88%91&submitButton1=Etymology
 
Interestingly, keeping the above in mind, the character for righteous, 義, may represent a sacrifice of a sheep and products of the field, which would parallel the account of Cain and Abel, or some other sacrifice.
 
And to get this discussion back to something related to this lesson the character 孕 (yun) in pregnant (huai yun), is a child within a lady, something that can be clearly seen in the original form:
 
http://www.internationalscientific.org/CharacterASP/CharacterEtymology.aspx?characterInput=%E5%AD%95&submitButton1=Etymology

Posted on: Embrace your Fears! 怕 (pà)...Adj

Thanks Connie! :)

Posted on: Embrace your Fears! 怕 (pà)...Adj

From the intro I got the impression that pa4 is used to say "don't like". Near the end of the lesson they said that "Clay pa4 Amber". The context indicated that this meant "Clay is afraid of amber" instead of "Clay doesn't like Amber."

Can the meaning of pa4 then depend on the context?

Posted on: The Person Component

I like the concept of using video for characters. I have usually skipped over the audio lessons that tried to explain characters, but think video would be a very good medium for this.

Here's the kind of information I think would be interesting and useful in a radical show:

1) Explain how to write the radical when is part of another character (and show examples). The best part of this lesson was when we SAW the person WRITING the character by HAND. I liked how the character progressed from formal to handwritten form. This helps with character identification in real life. Showing different modern writing and font styles would be helpful too.

2) Explain useful memory aids to remembering the meaning of the radical. Show how the radical originated from the original form (only if this aids in memorization). Show how we can relate the shape of the object to a picture/animation that can aid memory (for example see: Tuttle: Learning Chinese Characters (Matthews), Fun With Chinese Characters Set (Tan Huay Peng)).

3) Discuss how the radical adds meaning to other characters. Show them being written out as you are explaining the components. Show variations of the radical when it is written on the side/top/bottom/inner part of a character (with examples)

4) Highlight and show any differences between the simplified and traditional radical. For example, hua4 would be a good exploration of this aspect. Especially since the traditional form is kept when it is a stand-along character.

5) Use humor only if it enhances the educational content or acts as a memory aid. For example, I really enjoyed the first what's the story with Jenny and the wolf. The picture humor was directly connected to and enhanced the content of the lesson. I also enjoy the banter found in many chinesepod lessons because incidental, it is not made the focus of the lesson.

6) Have a few intro lessons that do NOT concentrate on radicals, but rather show:

a) How to write characters (stroke order, balance, etc).

b) How to enter characters on a PC.

The radical lessons could assume this base knowledge (it does break the lessons in any order rule, but it would be extremely useful information to the Newbie).

Posted on: Lesson

It looks like the amazon site which hosts all the files are down.

Posted on: Consoling the Bereaved

The third exercise (fill in the blanks) seems a bit messed up. The first time it listed 3 xu1yao4. Then when I pressed restart, it listed 2 xiwangs and 3 xu1yaos. Also I thought most of the sentences were right, but it said that only one was correct. This is the first exercise I have tried... a bug perhaps? I am using IE7

Posted on: Lesson

The vocabulary section says that shuai4 is "commander-in-chief", but I think in this case it should be "handsome"...