User Comments - mark

Posted on: Designated Driver for Hire

I think we call 趁机抢劫喝醉的人， "rolling a drunk".

Posted on: How to Eat Crawfish

I don't live in a trailer park, but if I had to decide what to call them in a hurry, I'd call them crawdads.

Posted on: On a Wok-About

I remember seeing the Walkabout movie. I wasn't sure, if the title of this lesson was a reference to it, or not, though, because it was released a while back, and I wasn't sure that Tom would know about it. I immediately made the connection, though.

I never saw the Crocodile Dundee movie(s). Maybe, in part, because Dundee sounds like a brand of marmalade to me. However, I did see a bunch of advertisements featuring a roguish looking blond guy with an over-sized knife. I have no idea what the movie was about, though.

Posted on: Cui Jian and His Greenhouse Girl

Good show.  加油！I especially appreciated David's interpretation of the lyrics.

Usually, when I'm in China, if I don't say anything, people don't speak to me, or speak English.  However, one time when I was in Taipei, I bought a couple 崔健 CDs, and the cashier immediately started speaking Chinese to me.

Posted on: Ways to Break Up

不要以为如果你是我男朋友的话，就可以随便看我的手机

Posted on: Ways to Break Up

I think the sentence has an implied 如果。。。的话。So, I would translate it as, "You can't read my texts whenever you want, just because you are my boyfriend."

Posted on: Housing Supply and Demand

很羡慕你的强调和口音。

Posted on: Writing Characters vs. Typing Characters

I've met some people who use 五笔？ (a method that requires understanding the principal strokes in a character), but once mastered is much faster than typing pinyin. Myself, I just use pinyin because it is a lot easier to recognize characters than make them from scratch, and pinyin is a good fit with how I learned to write in English.

Posted on: The Colors of Money

If I recall correctly, green eyes indicate ravenous hunger or greed. So, perhaps some one dangled a slab of meat in front of a hungry wolf.

Posted on: I'm Being Followed!

This lesson makes me wonder if police in China would really be so pleasantly responsive to this kind of call.  I've never really had dealings with the police in China, but it doesn't match my expectations in the states.  I think there would be a long wait before anyone came, if they came at all, and they wouldn't be very happy about it when they did come.