User Comments - neemazad

Posted on: Designing the New Apartment

"[even if] look, and [still] look-not-understand"

(Pardon the Chinese explanation, no expert here...not sure if there are mistakes)

应该是个句型。看起来第一个“看”（或者另一个动词）代表一个条件，“即使我看的话”。。。那结果是我还看不懂。（第二个“看”是“看不懂”的一部分。）就是说，试着看没有什么好处，不值得一看。

别的例子：

吃也吃不饱 (even if I eat, I still won't be full -- there's not enough food to feel full)

跑也跑不动 (even if I run, I won't get very far -- I'm out of shape or unwilling to run)

Posted on: Designing the New Apartment

At 11:25, Jenny says 把那个墙打掉 (tear down that wall, where "that" is [@11:15] 阳台和房间之间的那个墙 the wall in between the balcony and the room). I think John spoke incorrectly, and Jenny just went along with it ¨对¨ and explained it correctly in Chinese.

Also, the same meaning (of breaking the wall) comes through in the Chinese explanation at 10:56.

Either I'm not understanding John's explanation or it was most likely wrong -- "close in the balcony" sounds to me like you're surrounding the balcony on all sides with walls, or something similar, and this is quite the opposite.

For me, it helps to think about this as "open up" the balcony by "breaking 打 through 通". My guess is you could also 把厨房打通 ("open up the kitchen" by tearing down some walls), if I'm understanding correctly, to get the 开放式厨房 discussed earlier :)

Posted on: Wedding Photo Shoot

Is it just me, or does the male speaker in the dialogue pronounce the two "ai" endings differently from "normal"标准 in the sentence around 00:56? (I think I've heard this same speaker in another dialogue also pronounce the "ai" ending there differently as well.)

这些男人的表情都很“deh“，肯定是不想”peh“

When I first heard it, I thought maybe I was hearing an "ei" ending (I definitely didn't hear 呆dai1 and 拍pai1), but the ending sound is actually different from both "ei" and "ai", and it seems like most native speakers I show this audio to naturally autocorrect it to "ai" in their heads/ears. Of course, when I say the sound as I hear it, they say that just sounds "wrong", so *shrug* not sure if my ears are off or if tolerance for non-native speakers speaking non-standardly is lower/I'm not reproducing the sound accurately. :)

(For comparison, the audio playback of the sentence in the "Dialogue" tab is very clearly "ai" endings.)

I think in other situations, I've heard other "ai" endings like 看起来 be pronounced like 看起”leh", but my native speaker friends assure me that is "weird" also. Is this pronunciation a "common"/standard deviation from Standard Mandarin? (Sort of like "n/ng"-distinction mixups and varying "rhotacizations" of "sh" "zh" "ch" to sound closer to "s" "z" and "c", e.g. in Southern China?)

Posted on: Editing a Photo

Wow, I really liked the outro in this lesson. Jenny translated some of the key words into Chinese as John was saying them, like 跑题, kept the conversation fluid while repeat-translating some of the English words John said into new Chinese sentences, and also finished the outro with 真的跑题跑了很远... <3

Posted on: How to use “所”──”所”的用法

Also a question on "The 所 in the latter sentence is emphasizing the person 安同 killed is the exact same person with the person I love."

Is there an alternate interpretation of "安同杀了我爱的人" -- that is, who else could have been killed by 安同? Is it sort of like the difference between "Antong killed someone I love" vs "Antong killed the one (person) I love!" ?

Posted on: How to use “所”──”所”的用法

I guess I don't have enough of a gut feeling yet for what the word does to guess whether it changes the meaning... :)

Maybe to try to translate the first example... could the difference be something slight like: "Everything I said was true" vs "All that I said was true" (or even "Everything said by me was true") -- where the meaning is really the same, just the second sounds a little more "stuffy"/aged than the first (and the one in parenthesis uses passive voice)?

Posted on: How to use “所”──”所”的用法

Thanks all for turning this forum suggestion into a full lesson and dialogue. It's great to hear some of the most common uses of 所 in context! I especially liked the explanation at the end of 无所谓 == 没有什么好说 == doesn't matter! :)

I'm also kind of curious about what feeling 所 evokes when used outside of these very common collocations / 在这些规定搭配之外.

For example, the sentence fragments 我爱的人 vs 我所爱的人 . If the literal meaning conveyed is about the same, does this use of 所 introduce other connotations or feelings?

Posted on: Love Tangle 7: The Mistress Returns

you've gotta choose your words carefully in... hard-to-navigate... situations...

Posted on: Love Tangle 5: The Mistress

From the future, it sounds to me like John's point is actually a remark about the English language (and probably most other languages), which generally has (have) more words to degrade women than they do to degrade men -- as a reflection of society / a dominant patriarchy / etc...

Language is power, I suppose...

[Anyways, the comment seemed pretty PC and unoffensive to me.]

Posted on: Jizhou Mental Breakdown

Sorry -- blast from the future -- loving the series by the way -- but a question about the meaning of one of the Expansion Sentences:

“你猜她听了那个消息以后会有什么反应？” is translated as "Take a guess what kind of reaction she had when she heard that news."

I'm wondering whether this is a mistake in the translation -- should it be "Take a guess what kind of reaction she'll have after she hears the news" -- the 听了...以后 being the "after ... hears" part (as in she has not yet heard the news)?

If the given translation is not a mistake, what is the best way to understand the role of 会 in the example?