User Comments - tage
tage
Posted on: Addressing People Revisited
September 10, 2011 at 10:16 PMIs 师傅 still commonly used? Would you call a guy younger than you by say 20 or 30 years 师傅 ?
Posted on: 牌坊
August 28, 2011 at 9:56 PM牌坊跟牌楼有什么差别?
Posted on: Eating Idioms, Part 1
February 12, 2011 at 5:24 PMAs far as I can make out these expressions have very different degrees of double meaning. 吃素 can be used in both original and derived meaning without problems - context will decide, whereas I guess 吃软饭 can only mean 'to live of a woman' or can it safely be used in another way? How do you say 'He hates to eat vinegar" without being misunderstood? And what if you actually like to eat doufu? Do you have to phrase it in another way or will context help you, so people don't smile? (OK - they might anyway).
Posted on: Inside the Baozi Business
February 9, 2011 at 11:01 AMWhat's wrong with tea leaf eggs? Easy to make and fine taste.
Posted on: 温州人
February 7, 2011 at 11:42 PMAs Connie says at 7:43 the saying goes back to 伊索 Yi1suo3 - Aesop, so this takes us back to the 6th century BC. I think the story about the fox and the grapes made its way into a lot of languages long ago. In Danish the grapes were changed to rowanberries - since we didn't grow grapes at that time. The funny thing is that rowanberries (at least in our climate) always are sour - but nice looking. Which gives a little twist to the original morale.
Posted on: Of Soldiers and Military People
February 5, 2011 at 7:21 AM当兵很辛苦。 Can this really mean "to become a soldier is very hard"? Maybe it is sometimes more ideomatic in English to translate 当 as "become" (长大后我想当兵), but I think it actually means "to be" or "to act/function as" - not to "become". If you want to say that it is hard to get into the army for one reason or another, then maybe it could be 进军很辛苦 or 投军不容易。Would that be correct?
Posted on: Dialing a Nonlocal Phone Number
January 11, 2011 at 7:16 PMHi Bodawei
Two different words I think. 情爱 qing'ai and 亲爱 qin'ai . Seems to mean more or less the same, maybe somebody can explain difference in use.
I really like the small dialect variations in ChinesePod. Very useful.
By the way - Danish is supposedly a very difficult language to learn because we simply bite of half of most words when we speak fast.
Posted on: Dancing in Public
November 8, 2010 at 8:05 AMMemories - Chengdu 1984, strolling down to the river I came upon a small riverside café and people were dancing in the garden, in public! Not yangge, but Western ballroom dancing, young and old, men and women, men with men, women with women. I just sat down and watched for hours (我不会跳舞) - and the rumour went around - public dancing had also been allowed in Beijing and Shanghai. Then you knew that kaifang and gaige (开放改革) had won the day
Posted on: One-Way Street Scuffle
November 6, 2010 at 2:15 PMMy (fairly new) dictionary simply notes 纪录 as a variant of 记录 with no difference in meaning or use.
Posted on: Chinese Kung Fu
October 9, 2011 at 12:42 PMUnderlined works here