User Comments - suburbanite
suburbanite
Posted on: The Attitude Pattern (yǒu shénme... 有什么...)
July 15, 2008 at 1:08 PMJohn Candy--ok
Jim Carrey--ok
But how do you explain Alan Thicke!
BTW Growing Pains (w/Thicke) is dubbed on CCTV. too funny.
Posted on: #44
July 14, 2008 at 7:03 PMWah!
Posted on: Weekend Plans
July 11, 2008 at 2:00 PMI agree with patmetheny. The diagog was really rapid. Occaisional changes like this are goo ear training. Thanks for the shock to the system.
Posted on: Who is that?
June 15, 2008 at 2:26 PMQ: did anybody else have difficulty with the pronounciation in the last half of the dialog?
(zhen v. jin and tiao v. piao) I thought that made the lesson a little more challenging from a listening perspective. A good challenge none the less.
Posted on: Hungry Traveler: Hong Kong
June 13, 2008 at 5:08 AMThank you for this timely lesson.
I will be having 点心 在香港 soon. How would I contruct that sentence in Mandarin properly?
I think the chicken feet are a little more palatable when deep fried. But I truly crave the BBQ pork buns.
Posted on: Sightseeing at Tiananmen
June 11, 2008 at 4:20 PMSo Clay--is there any posibility of having a font-size addition to the comment editor? That might save some extra CAPS.
Posted on: Sightseeing at Tiananmen
June 11, 2008 at 4:00 AMI agree with Changye. Using Chinese-perakun or paper while not always simple, but necessary. Afterall we are learning.
A note on dictionaries: (and I would like comments back)
For a beginner (absolute), the Oxford beginners chinese dictionary seems to be a nice place to start. They have a radical table and all of that, but the Chinese section is orderd alphabetically by pinyin spelling. Anybody else have a recommendation?
I found other dictionaries that really required the reader to know the character sounds or radicals -- even if you have the pinyin, there was no easy way to lookup the word.
I have been using perakun for about 2 months and really like it. Plus as you read you review the characters and pinyin. It's not a perfect solution, but you can get pretty far. Babelfish and google translator are fine, and I use them. I prefer the browser plugin solution.
Posted on: Working Hours
June 6, 2008 at 3:26 AMNice lesson. I dare say learning has occurred. I got this w/o peeking at the vocab. Thanks.
Posted on: Fat Camp
July 23, 2008 at 5:53 PMJenny -- "People started to swell along with their wallets." That's a very insightful comment. In the states we don't think of the fast food and sweets as luxuries anymore. In China that is not the case. Although a beautifully decorated cake can be cheap, Mickey D's is still considered expensive. And the cake is not loaded with sugar. Western diets are more likely to have highly refined carbs--akin to just eating sugar.
More than that, I think the average Chinese is still more active on a daily basis than the average person in the US.
I was recently in China. At lunch one day our host asked us, "Would you like to have Western food tonight?"
"No Western food makes you fat."