User Comments - pretzellogic

Posted on: Come on up!

Frances, Amber,  thanks for the clarification.

Posted on: Come on up!

oh, i'm first? where's my bar of gold-pressed latinum? :)

Posted on: Come on up!

I thought there was a difference when you were supposed to use yao1 instead of yi1.  but I guess cpod is saying that either can be used at anytime. 

I was in Beijing airport listening to the flight numbers, and kept hearing yao1 all the time, and not once an yi1.  I eventually figured it out, but then was wondering why language instructors didn't tell us this would happen.  Other instructors kept using yi1.

Posted on: The Olympic Marathon

how do you say, "the body obeys the mind"? I need to chant this during the longer training runs. I know body is shen3ti (I think), but don't know mind or obey. Thanks.

Posted on: Lao Wang's Office 3: A Call for Innovation

Nice series indeed.  interesting that Lao Wang is able to take some constructive criticism. I saw others that were working in central China saying they couldn't really be open with the boss about mistakes or better ways of doing things than the boss' way. I hear and sense that's partially changing though.

Posted on: Checking Baggage

In the offbeat lesson suggestion category...

It might be interesting to have a lesson about roadkill.  Not a big problem in China, but increasingly a bigger problem here in the US. It would be interesting to explain to Chinese people that running over geese, skunks, squirrels, the occasional deer and other wild animals happens all the time in parts of the US.  Just a thought.

Posted on: Checking Baggage

Thanks Amber.

Posted on: Checking Baggage

so how do you say,

what kind of airplane are we flying? Airbus 320?

wo3men fei1 shenma fei1ji? Airbus san1er4ling2 ma?

Posted on: A Chinese-Style Contradiction

@rich, about a 13 months after you asked your question, and my answer is not that great. You're probably no longer even a subscriber at this point. (but you're probably still around, unlike Merrill Lynch or Lehman Brothers).  I noticed that lao2 (tough) was a different lao (old).  Your question was insightful, but I think I just passively accepted that tough was different "lao2" than old.  I think its because at this point, i've realized there's more "xiang2"s, "xian2"s, and countless other words in mandarin that sound the same but have different meanings.  Chinese just has 100x more homonyms, and I just accept it. I'm not learning the characters now either. Would love to, but no time as it is.

Posted on: A Chinese-Style Contradiction

I'm not sure what measures cpod uses to measure how "effective" or "efficient" a lesson is, but I would say that a lesson that required the fewest complete listening run-throughs before you picked up the dialogue in its entirety would be the most efficient.  This has to be one of the most efficient lessons i've heard on cpod.  I think that was because of Ken's enthusiasm for telling the story, as well as the story itself.  I suspect,  unfortunately, that people connect with different lessons at different times, so there may not be a systematic way to get all the lessons to be as good as this one was for me (other than to do what cpod is already doing). But it's interesting to hear cpod or other's thoughts on this.

Maybe we should go back to ancient China for more lessons.  Maybe a Kung Fu master or two can teach us something.