User Comments - pretzellogic

Posted on: Asking for a Raise

Personally, i'd like to be able to tell Chinese friends/acquaintances that back in the US, i've painted about 6 houses, replaced a roof on a house, replaced a water heater, changed the oil in my car, replaced the starter motor, driven about 400,000 miles in my lifetime, rebuilt a carburetor and other estoreric things. But the fact that something can't be done in China, or that Chinese don't do some task, doesn't mean that I don't want to bring it up. I agree that UI lessons might be best to bring this up, but I also think that with a little creativity, some of these esoteric things can be mixed in with the mundane in a Intermediate lesson.

Posted on: Designing the New Apartment 2

When in Rome..... We've done the rice cooker thing as well. But somehow, the Chinese still seem to think of me as a foreigner. Not sure why.

Posted on: Asking for a Raise

another shade to what i'm saying is that 128 food lessons provides plenty of reinforcement. 106 lessons about love provides plenty of reinforcement.

Posted on: Asking for a Raise

Reinforcement is required in language learning, and multiple situations are required to add flavor, context and nuance to highlight appropriate/inappropriate language use. What I question is how much is enough. We don't have just one lesson that discusses (for example), relationships in various forms. For example, if you type "Friend" into the cpod search engine, we come up with 15 lessons. If you do an advanced search using the cpod search engine, and click to include lesson dialogue and vocabulary, and search on 'friend', you come up with 97 lessons. Or at least that's what I came up with. What I am saying is that 97 lessons that have friends/talk about friends and so on is a lot of lessons. I also don't know that anyone on this board, or at cpod knows that's enough lessons because I don't anyone has thought through in theory all the situations that people encounter day to day, and then discuss the dialogue necessary for it. I am also not saying that 97 lessons is enough to discuss friend/friendship. I am saying that given 97 lessons that include/discuss/allude to friends, or the 106 lessons that allude to love, or the 128 lessons that cover/allude to food, that maybe other lessons can be discussed that talk about less frequently used dialogue/words that are around everyday, but don't seem to merit focus; doorknob, corn, steel are relatively common terms/objects, but there's not as much on them for valid reasons.

I know i'm not the only person on this site with an IT background, and for laughs, I put in 'server' in the cpod search engine, and all I got back were food lessons.

Another way to say what i'm saying is that I'm also not clear about, for example, what is deficient in the existing set of 128 or so food lessons that food needs to be covered addressed/alluded to/hinted at in a 129th lesson. Catherine's point about "flattery" is well taken, as there isn't a lot on flattery that specifically comes up in a search of cpod lessons. But i'm not looking forward to more lessons with/about/alluding to flattery in them either.

In any event, I take Catherine's comment to mean the official Cpod position is that they're going to head in Catherine's discussed direction regardless of my argument. We can expect more of the same around what I would consider to be somewhat redundant lessons.

Posted on: Finishing Work for the Weekend

Or we don't say anything at all; just leave.

Posted on: Asking for a Raise

ok, so I made a post on your blog, but i'll ask my follow up question here. Can you give any insight as to what was more important about flattery that wasn't already at least partially covered by the other flattery lesson(s), or interpersonal relationship lessons, rather than starting right now with, say, a series on evolution?

Posted on: Asking for a Raise

I guess I am starting to wonder more forcefully if Cpod is going to cover new, or relatively uncovered territory for lessons. Like for example, another lesson about life in the village or in rural China. Granted the strong business focus of mandarin learners on the site, i'm thinking that the marginal value of another business lesson (given there are about 40-60 or so already) is less than the marginal value of another lesson about life in the village (less than 5).

Another way to ask: If Cpod is planning on having 2000 lessons, should we subscribers expect another 25 or so to cover business, 25 covering friendship, 20 or so covering romance, 10 or so covering relationships?

I'm really wondering if we'll get really new topics with new lesson vocabulary, rather than well covered topics.

Posted on: Asking for a Raise

observation: this lesson is pretty similar to the other Intermediate level asking for a raise lesson.

Posted on: Designing the New Apartment 3

3 things:

1) is this what a typical Chinese couple are doing nowadays? buying an apartment and doing serious remodeling are a really big committment prior to marriage.

2)there doesn't seem to be do-it-yourself culture in China. I was surprised in this lesson that the contractors did the painting because painting is one of the easiest things to do yourself.

3)I guess we'll need a series on divorce and learn some divorce language.

Posted on: When the Taxi Takes the Long Way

Cpod, because you give us the flexibility to move from level to level as we wish, it would really be helpful for you to include more vocabulary words than you do with which to practice. There are 10 or so words already in the lesson vocab section, but the ones in the post above are the new ones for me that I had to look up, and would have loved tohave flashcards and practice sentences around.