User Comments - trevorb

Posted on: Help at the ATM

Advice is probably short for "Advice Note" it's not something I recall recently but I'm sure I have been asked it I want to print advice note.

It's probably a term used move often in the finance community to mean receipt.

Posted on: Lessons, Customized Courses and Jobs

Arrgh, 20 pages. I'm never going to get 了！！！

I think I may have to start learning Klingon instead, I have a dictionary here somewhere and I suspect there are more Klingons living near me than chinese anyway ;-)

Posted on: The Left-handed Child

真的吗， was there some form of indicator that allowed the reader to know if the scrolls were right to left or left to right? Or did the reader just have to work it out?

Posted on: The Left-handed Child

I'm seeing possible smudging as you right the second and subsequent rows down as your hand is over the chars you wrote previously at that point if you are right handed. For right handed western writing you are always moving away from the previously written characters.

That said I think caligraphers tend to write with the hand in the air as opposed to resting on the paper as in western writing. Also of course the character stroke order is top left to bottom right (essentially) which suggests right handdedness (as in the lesson). Its just strange that the accepted way of writing became right to left rather than left to right..

Maybe because writing traditional chars took time the ink always had time to dry?

I've tried the hero thing writing I love my wife in the sand with a fish net on holiday......not sure it looked beautiful but it made her happy.... :-) even if I could have got away with writing anything and telling her that was what I wrote ;-)

Posted on: The Left-handed Child

Okay so traditionally I thought the way hanzi was written was from the right hand top corner downwards and across the paper in a leftward direction.  对不对。

now what I've observed with western writing and 左撇子人 is they smudge their writing as they must continually move over what they have just written.  Writing from the right corner and down would be absolutely perfect for a left handed individual and less so for a right handed individual.  

Why would a right handed person develop a scheme of this type?  wouldn't it have been more logical to go left down then right....?   Or were the first people to write 汉字 on paper 左撇子？

Posted on: The Left-handed Child

你是很坏人 ：-） 付买单的时候多少钱 ？

Hopefully they didn't ask you to pay 250 the wrong way ;-)

Posted on: The Left-handed Child

I have to ask where did the expansion statement

我不想杀人，我是被逼的

come from?  There are many things I feel I may need to say in chinese but I really really hope this is never one of them!!    You gotta love the range of vocabulary you get here  :-)

Posted on: Daddy Changes a Diaper

I really like these kind of things too...

I think sometimes that having teaching materials for children would be a really useful learning aid. I've often thought reading childrens comics or basic books would help develop both the language skills and the cultural understanding.

Alas as a student in a distant country most of the books I have or can obtain are more aimed at teaching someone travelling to china for a few days how to get a taxi to the hotel etc.... While these are interesting they are focused on teaching how to communicate some fairly specific things rather than just on the language as a whole.

I definitely remember things like this on the wall of my school, though the english version of course.

Posted on: Upcoming lessons, lots of Chinese and a "jia you!"

我不看过你的公告，但是我刚刚看到。 I guess 成龙 also gets older so doing your own stunts tends to break things. Still we have Karate Kid and Shaolin to look forward to soo :-)

蛇形拳 was actually the film that started me wanting to study chinese. I aspire to watch it in mandarin someday and understand it (despite the fact I think it was filmed in cantonese...). Yesterday I bough Curse of the Golden flower 'cos I saw it on offer. 我昨天又看到卧虎藏龙，还听不懂。。。下次看听得懂一点 ：-）

Posted on: Upcoming lessons, lots of Chinese and a "jia you!"

Well technically the goons were singing a song that went 硬糖硬糖硬糖硬糖yiddle ai poh.

But they were all about around that time and you wonder if the words came from a visit to china at some point eh! I imagine loads of kids hooked on western style boiled sweets ..... :-) Mind you I haven't guessed what the yiddle ai poh might be yet ...