User Comments - mark

Posted on: Shopping for the Wife

When I saw the title of this lesson, I thought for a second that it might be about mail order brides.

Posted on: Chinese Dialects (Part 2)

Thanks, Toianw, those are some very interesting statistics.

Maybe, I should ask CPod for a partial refund, because they have been promising that after learning Mandarin, I could communicate with 1.3 billion people, but it seems like the actual number is .53 * 1.3 billion = a mere 689 million. :=)

Posted on: Chinese Dialects (Part 2)

Well, David mentioned that recently some children in Shanghai don't learn Shanghainese. I also think there are some areas where the local dialect is close enough to standard Mandarin to be mutually comprehensible, Beijing, for example. I would count both of these cases as "only speaking standard Mandarin". Given that definition, I don't believe the percentage is 0.

A point that is in the back of my mind, is my experience with emigrants to the US. As long as the emigrants don't live in an isolated community, the spoken-at-home language, is usually forgotten within two or three generations. The usual sequence is: emigrant family arrives, speaks native language at home and encourages children to learn the native language. Children resent this encouragement, don't learn the spoken-at-home language very well, marry someone who is also more comfortable speaking English at home, their kids learn just enough to survive babysitting stays at grandma's place. Grandma is usually a softy for the rug rats. So, that isn't a very high bar.

I am wondering if a similar phenomena is happening between 普通话 and various 方言？

Posted on: Chinese Dialects (Part 2)

I am very curious as to what percentage of the Chinese population only speaks standard Mandarin, but not a local dialect?  It would also be interesting to know how this percentage has been changing over time.

Posted on: Raising the Rent

被 is a passive marker.  The credit card was cancelled.  We don't know who did the cancelling.

Posted on: Detective Li 11: Final Mission (Part 5)

In regard to John's questions in the outro, I liked this series.  The little mysteries are kind of fun, and I like following a story.

I think David is better at plotting out a series than the rest of you.  The series that he has written have coherent plots, while most other series have descended into chaos and seemed to just have stopped when the Cpod crew got bored with them ( the Canadian hammer salesman killed off by a ninja; Lili swept out of the scene by her Internet entropenuer; yi zhou ending in a way that was inconsistent with its early episodes; ...)

Posted on: Detective Li 11: Final Mission (Part 5)

I am curious if the punshiment that 黑猫 recieved was a death sentence.  One possible meaning of the passage saying although his injuries weren't life threatening, he received the legal punishment would be that he was executed.  Also, Detective Lee regreted both father and son.  This could also imply that the son is no longer among the living.

Posted on: Chinese and American Perceptions of Animals

My experience is that dictionaries provide an inadequate description of how words are actually used. I often have this experience when I try to translate something from English to Chinese, don't know the right words, and resort to a dictionary. The result is very often a word choice that sounds weird to a native speaker.

Apart from the fact that definitions in dictionaries are rather terse summaries of a word's meaning, usage changes over time. Dictionary providers try to keep up, but they don't always succeed.

Anyway, if you tell me that uncle Alfred is a bit of a black sheep, you may disapprove of his behavior, but I will admire him a bit for having earned this appellation from you.

Posted on: Chinese and American Perceptions of Animals

比如说贾伯斯肯定是一位黑羊，不过当黑羊让它变成一个很厉害的发明家。

Posted on: Chinese and American Perceptions of Animals

I think I will side with Greg on the meaning of "black sheep". It is not particularly negative to say, "X is a black sheep".

However, I suspect that the nature of a "black sheep" and 害群之马 are very similar. They are probably both a person that is diliberately different from his cohort. The difference in interpretation probably comes from a difference in cultural attitudes. In the US, we tend to glorify someone who deliberately behaves differently than his peers. In China, I think， this kind of behavior is regarded as harmful to the peers.

So, translating "black sheep" to "害群之马“ is probably correct in describing the behavior, but confusing in regard to how the behavior is percieved.

就是我个人的想法。