User Comments - trevorb

Posted on: Superman

Well I can tell you about the 得 and what that is doing.

It is working to mark out an adverb.

The fly 飞 is the verb what the bird is doing. But its not just flying its flying in particular way. If it was just flying fast you would say:

飞得快 much like the tigers in the two tigers episode and song that 跑得快。

In this case the bird as well as flying fast is also flying high or 又快又高。 This phrase is therefore used to replace adverb being appled after the 得. Thus 飞得又快又高。

As to the tense thing I'm not good at that but I know that you can't add suffixes such as 了 or 过 to this but can't really explain what you would do. It may use the other form of adverbial marker 地（also de not di)

小鸟快快地飞过 but not sure if you can use the 又。。。又 pattern here. Hopefully someone better at this aspect than me will calrify this for you.

Posted on: Introducing New Voices

Actually in England Jelly is what Americans call jell-o. i.e. something eaten with ice cream or used to make trifle.

Jam is the same but sometimes is also called preserve and both could be used with or without bits in them.

Posted on: Colors

You can always use the Skritter stuff for practising characters. Its quite effective and if you subscribe to CPod its part of the functionality otherwise you can go to Skritter.com to get hold of it...

Otherwise just write them on anything. Do expect new ones to displace old ones thought ;-) Once you have the idea of the stroke order writing them then checking them back is not too hard...

Posted on: A Magazine Subscription

Bababardwan: Doesn't really matter if it did or didn't that's a helpful picture for getting it to stick in the mind..... :-)

Posted on: Skritter and CPod Partners

Hi bababardwan

I've posted some information on the book and the strokes it talks about here:- Learn to write Chinese characters (http://chinesepod.com/community/conversations/post/10632) sorry I can't make this a link in a reply only in the main comment and that would take the thread off topic!

I think that the right to left stroke is actually a 撇 piě stroke that is actually so light a right left slope that it is almost horizontal.

Posted on: Skritter and CPod Partners

You are right. I have a book called learn to write Chinese characters that describes doing exactly that, pressure at the beginning and end of a horizontal line.

When skitter is trying to hint the horizontal should go right left it is actual like a small triangle, like putting the brush down hard at the start and trailing off to nothing at the end.... The top stroke on 看 is a good example....

Technically I don't think these triangular strokes are seen as a horizontal line at all. I could dig out the book and find out what the stroke is called if you like...

Posted on: Skritter and CPod Partners

Yeah, has the same flash problems as the iPhone though. Keep watching the market and you'll see some other devices making an appearance that will be even better for chinese study. Writing with your finger is a bit wearing and a bit in acurate....though I must admit I do use it a lot with pleco.

Posted on: Skritter and CPod Partners

I use skritter on a windows tablet PC and doing that is a really good way to do it. I'm hoping that the iPad has started off a fashion that will lead to many more slim usable tablets, some of which will have pen input. This would make an ideal platform for using skritter......

Posted on: Skritter and CPod Partners

Ah I thought there would have to be a reason why your strokes were backward, your chinese is too good to be making mistakes :-)

but don't expect skritter on the iphone too soon, Steve Jobs has a thing against flash and the current skritter code is all flash based. Though they may be starting to work on HTML5 code to cover this......

Posted on: Skritter and CPod Partners

I think that message has always been there, but I may be wrong. From what I read on their site I think with the full version you get the spaced repetition stuff to try and help you practice the ones you get wrong the most.... other than that I don't see much difference.

I suspect you don't get your strokes backward enough to see the method. Its pretty good at telling me when I've done that! Normally its the shape of the stroke that clues me up that I should have gone right to left not left to right.