User Comments - pretzellogic

Posted on: WithstAnding 和，跟，and 与

oh, that's how you translate "cru". I just passed over it, in the hope I would get the jist of the sentence.

Posted on: WithstAnding 和，跟，and 与

yeah baba, French that now seems to be replaced by Chinese. I was in Montreal trying to give a briefing in even a couple of lines of French, and all that came out was Chinese. I should have practiced the French earlier. Live and learn.

Posted on: WithstAnding 和，跟，and 与

so lamartiniere, I realize your note was to veronique, but I was reading it, and realizing that I understood about 90% of it. I'm happy to see that my high school french is still buried in my head somewhere, and hasn't been completely removed :-)

Posted on: A Complicated Cab Ride

This is definitely a helpful lesson.  If you're lucky enough to stay in China for more than a couple of days, you end up having to direct the driver to where you want to go.  It also would have been helpful in the lesson to include a statement like, "我知道怎么走。我告诉你“

Posted on: Registering for 3G Service

Hi Chris, thanks for the reply. the overwhelming majority of those unread emails are newsletters that I've signed up for from Tech Republic, Networkworld, Computerworld, etc..... But most people share your philosophy around email. Thank god for internet anonymity!!!

Posted on: Preparing for the Ironman Race

mtennant, so I went to the ITU International Triathlon website, and after much more searching than I would have thought, it looks like the distances were Swim: .75km, Bike: 21km, and Run: 5K. Is that correct?

Posted on: ChinesePod Meetup

Hopefully, pictures from the Shanghai meetup will be posted where everyone can see them.

Posted on: ChinesePod Meetup

I second a Beijing meet-up!

Posted on: Preparing for the Ironman Race

I'm a bit disappointed with this lesson. I did a bit of triathlon training in the gym.  If someone asked me what I was doing, I would say stuff like, "Well, i'm running 10 miles on the treadmill with no problem, but it takes too long, like an hour and 40 minutes.  So I started doing interval training to increase my speed.  I'm trying to get down to 8 minute miles.  The biking distance is around 50 miles, and my times aren't that great, but i'm ok with that.  The hardest part is swimming. I don't have the endurance, my flip turns are horrible in the pool, and the water is always freezing. At this point, I can only swim about 3 laps before I have to stop.  I have a lot to do before I might even be considered competitive."  So I was hoping to learn dialogue like "flip-turns", "laps", "intervals". 

Plus this would have been a fantastic time to talk about injuries.  At some point, you train for an event and get hurt.  Sometimes it's merely cramps, but other times it shin splints, muscle tears, sprained ankles.  Or you fall off the bike and get scraped/cut/bruised.  Or the run went fine, but then you get crazy muscle pain about an hour after you finish running.  Or everything went well across all three events, but then you notice your knee is swelling, so you raise it and ice it.  Some people believe in stretching, so you could have talked about pre-race stretching and specific stretches done to relax hamstring or quadracep muscles.  I was hoping to learn dialogue around all these things. 

Posted on: Motivating a Team

tingyun, it's interesting that you didn't mention using cpod for speaking practice. I noticed that cpod and other users tend not to discuss on the boards using cpod as a speaking resource.