User Comments - nik.5578

Posted on: Issues with Flavor

oh ok thanks for the tip, I was just typing into the empty white box below the comment feed and assumed it would work sorta like facebook haha.

your google search method is pretty ingenious, if you ask me. i've done google searches before and was always too overwhelmed at the complexity of my search results, because i wouldnt be able to read enough of the results to understand how the phrase i was searching was being used. but the fact that you judge on how many hits you get by searching a phrase is perfect haha.

unfortunately tho, i don't have a lot of people around me that speak chinese, since i'm in the states. i do have a good amount of chinese friends at college, but about half of them either speak cantonese or a dialect of mandarin that's very different from 普通话 so even still it's difficult for me to become a passive absorber. i'm hoping that will change in my classes tho, since i've heard that upper level chinese courses increasingly phase out english in their instruction, so that will hopefully really help.

Posted on: Cooking

Although this is an old lesson, I have a question that has been giving me trouble for a while. This lesson's dialogue has the 听起来 construction, which seems simple enough until you consdier that 好象 and 这样 also mean "like, seems like, etc." How do I know when to use each of the three constructions? Because I seem to often get them wrong, based on 老师 often correcting me in my university class. Unfortunately, since the 起来 construction was never covered in my class, she never explained how to stop my confusion...she would only say "起来 would work better here than 好象" Can anyone help me out?

Posted on: Issues with Flavor

a better way to describe my "issue" is that frequently I'll see or hear something and understand what it means, but it wasn't the way I would have said it. Almost always though, it makes more sense and I say to myself "ah ok! that makes perfect sense and it even gets the point across a little better! now why didn't I think of that....especially because I already know all the vocabulary/grammar that was just used...." it can definitely become frustrating at times because it highlights my underdeveloped (for my taste at least) "Chinese brain" haha

Posted on: Issues with Flavor

hm, wow, very interesting and very helpful! thanks a lot for the thorough comment! my issues with thinking fluency are becoming more and more apparent....because I already know all of these adjectives you've used (甜，油，重， etc), but I just forget about them and instead try to make too literal a transition from English to Chinese....it really puts language learning into perspective and makes you have a lot of respect for multilingual people because there's so much to "remember" so to speak.

out of curiosity though, how would you search it on google to see how it's used? what did you type in?

Posted on: Issues with Flavor

ah ok! i completely forgot about using 重 but it pretty much sums up all of what i was curious about. thanks! i'm a little surprised tho that no one says something tastes rich. i suppose oily would cover what we consider "rich" most of the time, but what about things like double triple chocolate cake with chocolate fudge on it hahaha ya know, something like that?

Posted on: Issues with Flavor

in the show, you guys mentioned that 浓 is usually used with a positive connotation. what would you say if something you're eating or drinking is too strong, too overpowering, or too rich? is there a better expression than 有一点儿浓 / 太浓了？