User Comments - richwarm2
richwarm2
Posted on: Tone Controversies
March 31, 2013, 03:30 AM
Here are a couple of comments from Connie, taken from the discussion in a couple of Intermediate lessons:
- Regarding 着想:
着想，正确的读音应该是"zhuóxiǎng". 但是在日常生活中，读"zháoxiǎng"的人还是挺多的。
- Regarding 粘贴 and 框:
因为字典上是"nian2tie1", "kuang4"，所以我们在transcript里用了字典上的读音。但是生活中，大多数人都说"nian1tie1"，"kuang1".
Posted on: Tone Controversies
March 31, 2013, 03:11 AMIn English, words are often pronounced differently from what the dictionary says. For example, the "middle t" (as in "party") may be pronounced as "d" by some people (especially in America), or may be missing (esp. in London[*1] and Yorkshire[*2]).
Yet Merriam-Webster gives the pronunciation as simply 'pär-tē\, and Wiktionary only says /"pA:.ti/ (UK); /"pAr.ti/ (US). Wiktionary has audio of Canadian and US speakers saying "party", and the "t" in the audio sounds like "d", quite different from the "t" in the Wiktionary audio for the word "tea", for example.
Quotes from the Web:
[*1] The missing "t" [in the English of Londoners] is a personal bugbear of mine - and it is not just in the middle of words - "what" is often pronounced "wha-", as in "Know wha- I mean, like?"
[*2] While the glottal stop in Yorkshire is best known at the end of words, it is also used to replace a middle "t".
Posted on: Tone Controversies
March 31, 2013, 03:02 AMNot all dictionaries say it's dǎyàng. It's dǎyáng here:
http://cidian.51240.com/dayang_un5__cidianchaxun/
and here:
http://dict.revised.moe.edu.tw/cgi-bin/newDict/dict.sh?idx=dict.idx&cond=%A5%B4%AFL&pieceLen=50&fld=1&cat=&imgFont=1
Posted on: Philosophy: a Useless Major?
January 12, 2013, 08:38 PMThanks, Connie and tingyun, for your excellent replies. I'm not looking for standardized dialogues and formally correct pronunciation, but I would have liked to have some acknowledgement in the vocab list or commentary that there are these two ways -- proper and colloquial -- to say 着想. Maybe one is expected to already be aware of that if one is studying at Upper Intermediate level?
Sorry I took so long to respond. Is there some way we can get email notification when someone replies to our questions in Chinesepod lesson discussions?
Posted on: The Many Ways to Play
January 12, 2013, 08:22 PMKeth, I'm no expert on translating into Chinese, but I tried typing "played a joke on" into jukuu.com, and from that, I got the impression that your suggestion may be a too-literal translation of the English idiom into Chinese. The patterns I found at jukuu for "X played a joke on Y" were
1) X和Y开了个玩笑
2) X开了Y一个玩笑
3) X对Y恶作剧一番
4) X戏弄了Y
So maybe you could say 她和我开了个玩笑。
Posted on: Philosophy: a Useless Major?
December 11, 2012, 01:38 AMThe voice actor says 着想 as [zhao2 xiang3] during the dialog:
我们是为你的前途着想...
But Jenny and John discuss it as [zhuo2 xiang3], without acknowledging what the actor actually said, and the vocab list also says [zhuo2 xiang3]. Any comment from Chinesepod staff?
Posted on: Difficult Cake Choices
October 11, 2012, 10:19 AMI think that if you want a Chinese verb to match "exaggerate", then 夸大 may often be a better choice than 夸张.
I have never believed in exaggerating the role of any one individual
我历来不主张夸大一个人的作用
I think this is a further reason why we should insist on people not exaggerating the differences between British and American English.
我想，这进一步说明了为什么我们坚持主张不要过分夸大英国英语和美国英语之间的差别。
You are exaggerating the difficulties.
你把困难夸大了
Posted on: Hamsters, Snakes, and Owls
October 09, 2012, 09:36 AMRJ wrote: "I have to say the only posts that made me uncomfortable here were not Tal's. The whole thing was a bit of an over-reaction I think to what started out as just an off the cuff bit of sarcasm and humor ... we need to give each other a wider berth and not enter with axes ground and hammers back."
Yes, you're right, RJ. I've reflected on this discussion, and I think I'm largely responsible for it becoming acrimonious, almost getting to the point where 话不投机半句多 ("words turn sour, and to say one word more is a waste of breath"). Some of my earlier comments, in particular, were unnecessarily provocative, and I'd like to offer my belated apologies to everyone (especially Tal) for those comments, which helped to trigger the unpleasant exchanges that followed. I think I should have simply supported one person's view and ignored an impulse to attack someone else's view at the same time. In fact, as I wrote later, I think you can say that both views (Tal's and Mr Trendy's) were right, depending on how you look at the matter.
I suggested at one point that we "ignore [what we perceive as provocations], and simply respond to the *substance* of what [others] say", but I can see that I failed to follow my own advice, particularly at the beginning.
Posted on: Hamsters, Snakes, and Owls
October 05, 2012, 09:08 PMVery interesting. The nomenclature for muroid rodents in Japan seems to have more in common with China than the English-speaking world -- i.e. Japanese "nezumi" is a close match for "laoshu", it seems, but there's no single, colloquial word in English that quite does the job.
Yes, the species "Norway rat" has "brown rat" as a common name (and "Rattus norvegicus" as a scientific name). I think "wharf rat" is an imprecise term that probably usually does refer to Norway rats. But "water rat" is not the same as Norway rat, I'd say. It's a "common name for several unrelated semiaquatic rodents such as European water vole, rakali, [etc]" [Wikipedia]. We also use the term "gutter rat" but, like "wharf rat", it's not intended to be a precise term. I think it just means "the sort of rat you see in the gutters" (which might well be a Norway rat, or possibly not.)
Thanks for explaining that 絹毛鼠 is a relatively obscure way of referring to hamsters. I'll avoid using that word! ;-)
二十日鼠 is the "house mouse" (小家鼠), the rodent we usually think of when someone says "mouse".
In translating the title of "Of Mice and Men" into Japanese, it makes sense to use 二十日鼠. That title comes from a Robert Burns poem, which begins "Wee, sleekit, cow'rin, tim'rous beastie" -- hardly the image of a rat, for example! ;-)
The phonetically spelt マウス (mausu) is also the word for a computer mouse, right?
Posted on: Tone Controversies
March 31, 2013, 10:46 AMHere's a list of a couple of hundred characters and words whose pronunciation varies between Taiwan and the mainland:
http://cc-cedict.org/editor/editor.php?handler=QueryDictionary&querydictionary_search=Taiwan+pr.