User Comments - mandarinboy

Profile picture

mandarinboy

Posted on: Adjusting the Temperature
August 06, 2010, 07:00 AM

Very useful vocab in this one. We are having daily battles about this since i like it to be Swedish summer warm (20 degrees C) and my wife and our children prefer it to be  more  Chinese standard (28 C).Now I can more accurately discuss this with them:-) 

Posted on: Street Argument
September 10, 2008, 07:58 AM

To help my self and my doughter to better remember the characters in each newbie lesson I have started to write posts with etymology for the characters in the newbie lessons. They are stored in an an group named Study-strategy: http://chinesepod.com/community/groups/view/81

I invite you all to help us out or to just learn from the explanations to the baground of the characters in the newbie lessons. Since there is only one newbie lesson per week It should be possible to catch up with all the characters in the near future.

My doughter is half Chinese and she is like all kids full of questions about the characters. This is my way of dealing with her questions and at the same time learn some my self. You are all most welcome to share your own examples for any character. With enough characters in store it will be easy to set up a short link list for each new lesson.

Posted on: Street Argument
September 08, 2008, 02:19 AM

Another technical suggestion, make it possible to save whole sentences an not just single words. I would love to save useful phrases from the expansion sets. After all, we do usualy speak full sentences and not just single words.

Posted on: Pretty Clothes
September 07, 2008, 04:58 AM

Even though i love CPOD and listen to it every day i feel that it lack some deeper explanation of the chraracters. Maybe natural since the focus is on the listening and speaking parts. Anyway, I got stuck at the aiport again so I took the time to collect my own old notes about etymology of Chinese characters and write some easy explanations. The first attempt of this I published in the "study strategy" group: http://chinesepod.com/community/conversations/post/3187

Right now it is just for one word ( two charaters) but if anyone else feels that this is helpful we can continue an add more. I have done this for many years on my own since i simly must understand every part of every character, That is why I am such a slow learner;-)

Posted on: Morning at the Office
August 23, 2008, 06:11 AM

To help users with the characters posters have mentioned the adsotrans plugin. It can be found here: http://www.adsotrans.com/downloads/install.html

Very simple install and use. ( is not working for internet explorer, only firefox. I use it for the latest version of firefox.)

as for norahs_dad question about typing chinese in windows, there is the IME in windows: for Xp you do like this: http://newton.uor.edu/Departments&Programs/AsianStudiesDept/Language/asianlanguageinstallation_XP.html

and for Vista: http://www.li-ming.org/Form/VistaChineseSetup07.pdf

Note. In vista you also have an very nice Chinese handwriting tool. You can use that to check you handwriting of chinese characters. I use it with an digitalpen but when i am traveling i do it with the mouse or preferable with the mousepad and that works fine too.

Posted on: Sales Call
August 09, 2008, 09:30 AM

I am using a study software i developed some years ago when studying the words from Chinesepod ( It is freeware if you like to give it a try: http://www.euroasiasoftware.com/ht/index.html)

I am now importing the vocabulary from the lessons that I am studying in to this software. My questions is, does anyone know if it is ok or not to share those lists with others? Transcripts is part of the bought material of Chinesepod. I do know that you can find the transcripts on many places on the net but that does not realy make it legal to share it. Any ideas? Anyway, it works great for me. I listen to Cpod when I ride the bike to work and when i come home i type in the lesson in homework trainer and then use the test capabilities to study the characters,stroke order pinyin and words. I have bought a better text to voice package so from time to time i also create my own mp3 files with just the words and i like to listen some extra on. The stroke order animations that is used by mandarintools, zdt, yellowbridge an more comes from this program. I will try to find some time to set up my servers again and correct some bad stroke order data. Unfortunately the code is written in old school visual basic and hence not 100% compatible with e.g windows vista.

Posted on: Do you have...?
July 31, 2008, 08:05 AM

Hmm, this lessons seems to have some problems. I can´t open any of the files, not even the pdf. Seems that the rest of you have been able to donwload so maybe it is just something that temporarily wrong.