User Comments - miskat
miskat
Posted on: Do You Live Alone?
September 17, 2012 at 11:23 PMI am not sure about the double 了, but with a single 了 the sentence to my understanding does not specify if the person is still living in Shanghai or not. It is actually also translated both ways in this lesson material ;-)
他在上海住过五年。He used to live in Shanghai for five years.
Posted on: Preparing for the HSK
August 28, 2012 at 7:38 AMThanks darkstar94, glad to know that I am not hearing things or that I am not alone with my madness ;-p
Posted on: Commuting Options
August 27, 2012 at 2:13 PMNo need to apologize :-)
I think I chose little bit bad day to write my initial comment. I actually had a bad experience on Sunday while driving back from Tianjin. Some young guys speeding almost hit our car. Twice. So my comments have been little bit more negative than normally.
Looking at the statistics (per 100k vehicles) China has 2-3 times more fatal accidents than my home country. I would assume that for non-fatal accidents the ratio is much higher.
However that is actually smaller than I imagined. I believe that at least some of the things you mentioned contributes to this.
That said I still think that traffic safety is the number three on my wish list of things to be improved in China. Number one is the pollution and number two is the amount of cars in Beijing.
I have lived in China for three years now (driving two years), my wife is Chinese and we have a beautiful daughter so I may be a bit bias to say this, but I do love this country :-)
Posted on: Commuting Options
August 27, 2012 at 6:57 AMI think that is very valid point.
I found this blog entry rather good:
http://seeingredinchina.com/2011/02/21/why-are-chinese-such-bad-drivers/
Do not let the title mislead you, it has good ideas why the situation is what it is here in China.
Posted on: Commuting Options
August 27, 2012 at 4:01 AMDriving culture is very much different here in China than what people in west are used to. There are quite a lot of people who do strange (and absolutely dangerous) things in the traffic, like driving without lights at night on expressways etc.
I do not exactly understand the reason for this, I guess it is related to the general safety culture (or the lack of it) in China.
Worst are the drivers (very small minority) who are just simply completely selfish and dangerously idiotic and drive like there are nobody else on the road. These are very often young drivers and almost ALWAYS men.
Don't get me wrong, most of the times I enjoy driving in China. But it is a very different and less safe activity than in some other parts of the world.
Posted on: Sensitive Topics
August 8, 2012 at 1:13 PMThanks, Vera.
Posted on: Sensitive Topics
August 3, 2012 at 4:37 AMIn the grammar:
住进新房，你觉得幸福吗？
"Are you happy after moving into the new house?"
How would "Are you happy that you will be moving into the new house?" be in Chinese?
Posted on: Taking Transportation
July 5, 2012 at 4:45 AM欢迎乘坐地铁一号线。
Brings back nice memories from few years ago... After I moved to China and started learning Chinese this was one of the first sentenced I learned (while commuting in Beijing's morning rush hour).
Posted on: Preparing for the HSK
July 5, 2012 at 4:33 AMThanks Connie.
Posted on: WeChat
September 20, 2012 at 4:40 AMI was telling my (Chinese) wife this morning how I learned about this new app called WeChat from the Chinesepod. "That is at least one year old" was the reply. Well, that's what you get marrying someone seven years younger :-)
Seriously speaking really like these kind of lessons where the "teaching" goes beyond the language.