User Comments - pretzellogic

Posted on: Leeching off the Parents

I guess Chinese don't kick their kids to the curb even when the kids deserve it.  Not that other parents do this either, culturally speaking.  I like that part about the 29 year old getting an allowance; bad on the parents for allowing that. And where's the girlfriend?

Posted on: Slippery Ground

Paulinurus, I realize i'm jumping into the middle of your conversation, but I did want to add something that is I hope of value.

When I was deciding that i'd had enough of Elementary, it was roughly at the same time I moved to China. I realized that I was woefully deficient in getting myself around town, and I decided that listening to taxi and direction lessons was the first area i'd better drill down into with Cpod. I download 10-15 taxi lessons, from Elementary to upper intermediate. I thought the upper intermediate taxi lesson would be helpful because it had a real conversation in it.

I got through the elementary lessons ok (there were plenty of taxi elementary lessons that I hadn't heard before), then I thought that the upper intermediate taxi was next best. Long story short, it took me about a month to get through that one lesson, listening to it for about 2 times a day for 30 or so days, and writing down the words in a notebook, saying the sentences over and over again. In the end, I somewhat had it to memory, but it was a pain. I decided to head down to intermediate. Intermediate by comparison was "easy", and it turned out that the processes I created to learn the upper intermediate lesson were valuable for learning intermediate level lessons.

to sum up what I did:

1) Just listen to the lesson dialogue 5-10 times. This is where/when I started doing shadowing.

2)write the dialogue down. I didn't listen to John/Jenny's explanations at first.

3) look up words thatI didn'tunderstand. John/Jenny didn't explain all the words in the dialogue, and there were usually 5-10 or so at first thatI didn't understand anyway.

4)I kept at it, and after 10 lessons, it got easier. I can at least understand most (~50-80%)of what Jenny says.

Posted on: Utensils in the New Kitchen

This is good useful vocab. I think that in the next lesson, somebody could say, "you forgot to get a rolling pin and a cutting board to make jaozi with." And that's how it goes too, you're always forgetting stuff when you move.

Posted on: Trick or Treat!

Oh yeah, in Beijing, someone should have wished me happy halloween.  But not even the other Americans did. Definitely a kids' holiday.

Posted on: Trick or Treat!

but maybe all English speakers use it? Could be. If you're refering to my comment about suxiaoya and geese, again, I was only joking. I know we use it in the States, but you're right, I don't have any idea about ownership of "gaggle of geese"

Posted on: Trick or Treat!

Actually, i've casually used it to refer to other adults in a joking manner. I've certainly heard the gaggle of geese usage, but adults, kids, moms, etc. as well. I will say i've never heard a gaggle of dudes watching American pro footbal :-) Or maybe its just a few Americans that like to play fast and loose with English.

Posted on: Trick or Treat!

I think the Americanization of Suxiaoya is going nicely, because i've heard "gaggle" in the US enough times :-)

Posted on: Job Shopping in Modern China

Wshoey, I neglected to say that, about 9 months ago, I posted looking for help learning Chinese X-rated slang on this website same as you did, and got the same responses you did. So from where I sit, nothing has changed. I went ahead and turned my mischief-making Chinese speaking desires into other language areas.

Posted on: Buying a SIM card

This is almost the lower intermediate SIM card lesson I was looking for anyway.

Posted on: Job Shopping in Modern China

wshoey, go ahead and be a trailblazer, and learn the curse words, and then come back here and teach me. It's always also good to know when someone is cursing at you, and I suspect that i've had a couple of people do that to me.