User Comments - suxiaoya

Posted on: City Districts in Shanghai

Martyang, you can find out accurate estimations on the time needed to travel between metro stations using this interactive Shanghai metro map: http://exploreshanghai.com/metro/

Posted on: A Short Haircut

Earlier this year I got totally ripped off at a hairdressers in Shanghai.

Soon after I'd had my hair washed, the hairdresser announced with blunt Chinese-style frankness that my hair was really dry. His colleagues were all very vocal in their agreement. They could sort it out with some special product, apparently. I asked the guy how much it would cost and eventually agreed to the price (much more than I had originally planned to spend).

Up to that that point it had been a very convivial experience (going to the hairdressers is great speaking practice!), but once he'd plastered half my hair in this special product "from France", the hairdresser explained that he didn't have enough to cover the rest of my head. 糟糕! What to do?!

Feeling totally under presssure from the hairdresser and his spiky-haired colleagues, and unwilling to cause a fuss, I agreed to get another bottle for the second half of my head. In the end I spent over 600RMB (I'd only wanted to spend 20!!).

My conclusion: It's worth being sure of exactly what you want before going to the hairdressers, especially if you're going to have to use Chinese to express it.

Posted on: National Day Holiday

FYI We also have an intermediate lesson on National Day, which was published last year for the PRC's 60th anniversary. Check it out here.

Posted on: Ways of Using ChinesePod

Hi user1283,

I'm sorry you had problems finding information about our iPhone app. For future reference, you can go to: http://chinesepod.com/mobile/iphone

This page can be found by clicking on the "Mobile Apps" link at the footer of every page of the site.

Posted on: The Third Tone

Hi connellolcan, I find sentence structures take me a long time to pick-up too. I think it's just a question of listening to their usage in lots of different contexts (you'll find most patterns repeated across many lessons).

If you practice writing your own sentences using new sentence patters, do feel free to post them up on the site. Connie and Jiaojie, or someone else in the team, are always happy to help offer feedback/corrections!

Posted on: NGOs in China and an Anniversary

zhenlijiang, thanks. The news box has been updated.

I'll be pushing that page a lot more when we have got the video montage uploaded. Unfortunately we're having a few delays in doing this, though the video is complete and was shown at our party on Friday. David (XuZhou) did a great job, so I'm looking forward to sharing it here!

Posted on: Revisiting Before and After

Invictus, a very warm welcome to you!

It's really good to learn that you enjoyed the lesson. Qing Wen lessons are mainly focused on how to apply the various aspects of Mandarin covered in our lessons (grammar, specific words or sentence patterns etc.).

For lessons of across a specific level, from "Newbie" (beginner) to Advanced, you can subscribe to a lesson channel and receive newly-published lessons automatically into your lesson list

(http://chinesepod.com/lessons/channels ). You can also "bookmark" individual lessons from the archive (choose any that interest you).

We look forward to seeing you around the Community pages! Just shout if you have any questions; we're here to help.

Posted on: Good Morning!

Welcome, sunraider7, it's great to know you are enjoying using the website. We look forward to seeing you here more!

Posted on: Paris

Hi, byronmeinerth -

With no Irish nationals in our office right now, we cannot can speak for Ken with any authority. However, I am almost certain that in British English, at least, this is grammatically incorrect. It sounds just like Chinglish to me, but I haven't noticed that it is used widely.

Posted on: Welcome to ChinesePod

It's great to have you here, apocgensis - welcome!

I hope it all goes well for you when you come to Shanghai next month, and that the lessons you find here can give you a great headstart in the meantime!