User Comments - monicarichards
monicarichards
Posted on: Making Plans for the Day
June 13, 2014 at 4:36 PMI notice in this lesson (and have noticed in my interaction with Chinese friends and colleagues as well) that Chinese speakers of higher status (e.g. a boss or teacher) speaking to someone of lower status (e.g. an employee or student) rarely (never?) use "please" or other hedging/politeness words to "soften" requests they make. I have three questions about this:
- In Chinese, do superiors basically never use "please," etc., when asking those under them to do something? Or do they just use these politeness words less frequently than what English rules of politeness require?
- If Chinese superiors do sometimes use "please" and other politeness words when asking those under them to do something, in what situations do they use these politeness words and in what situations don't they use them?
- I have a really hard time breaking English language cultural norms about this when speaking Chinese because it feels very rude to me not to use "please"/"thank you"/etc. when making a request of those under me (even though, in fact, I am functionally giving an order, not merely making a request my underlings can refuse or not, as they like!). If I follow English cultural norms when speaking Chinese, will those under me be confused? Will I sound too weird? Will it be hard for my students/employees to respect me as a boss?
If you have addressed my questions in other lessons, can you let me know in what lessons they're covered? Thanks!
Posted on: Language Power Struggle
May 29, 2014 at 2:58 AMHi, my Chinese friends, want to give me (honest!) feedback on the task I recorded for ChinesePod lesson "Language Power Struggle"? Here are my questions: Are there any individual words I'm mispronouncing? Does my pausing and the overall rise and fall of my voice (intonation) across my various sentences sound natural? (I feel like I'm overdoing the tones — am I?) When expressing an email address in Chinese, how do I pronounce the letters? Is it okay for me to say as English words the parts of the address that are English words (e.g. "Monica" and "state") before saying their spelling, or is that confusing? How do I express "@" and "." in Chinese? Download
Posted on: Maintenance Fees
July 25, 2014 at 7:20 PMVera,
Sorry, but I'm still a little confused. In the dialogue, the landlord paid the maintenance fee, Tom and his landlord pay half-and-half, and you said you pay it (I assume yourself) every quarter. So, IS there a norm in China for who pays? Sorry if I missed something!