User Comments - punter888
punter888
Posted on: Warm Winter Clothes
December 07, 2009, 01:22 PMThis was me this weekend in Shanghai. You would have thought that with all the information on the internet, I could figure out how to pack. Instead I experienced first hand how cold it can Shanghai winters can be on the inside!
Posted on: City Series: Bali
September 15, 2009, 12:25 PMHaving tried the cat turd coffee before, my thoughts are that as far as coffee goes, it was the worst cup I've ever had. Though speaking in terms of cat turds, I suspect it rates quite highly.
Posted on: Kungpao Chicken
May 03, 2009, 07:06 AMAny suggestions for downloading to iphone? When I right click the file, it prompts me to save as an HTML document. When I left click it then I get a web page of jibberish!
Posted on: Buying a Plasma TV
November 06, 2008, 05:25 AMSeparately, IMHO, the noise pollution from flat screen TV's is the bane of modern China. Lift lobbies, back seats of taxis, in the lifts, on the bus, waiting for the train, inside the rooms at the spa, next to the hot tub at the spa, even floating up/down the Bund. They are inescapable. The audio cacaphony from flat screen TV's in China is simply ubiquitious! 我受不了。。hehehe..are those the right characters?
Posted on: Buying a Plasma TV
November 06, 2008, 05:17 AMI just this morning met with a Chinese company that sells US$5bn of LCD/plasma screens every year. Chances are, they manufactured the screen you are looking at right now.
Up until June their average selling price was falling at a rate of about 5% per year. In the past couple months the bottom has fallen out of the market and the price decline has accelerated to 30%, and there is still huge inventory sitting around that needs to be offloaded. Bottom line, if you're buying a flat TV and sensitive to the price, better to wait for these abnormally large wholesale price declines to hit retail, as the impending drop will be steeper than the usual rate of decline.
Posted on: Hungry Traveler: Beijing
November 03, 2008, 03:13 PMWhat a fantastic lesson and comments!
Posted on: Lao Wang's Office 4: Communication in the Office
October 25, 2008, 04:11 PMAfter not having visited the exercises section since graduating from elementary, I was thrilled to stumble on all of the Hanzi in the Intermediate exercises section. However, and I'm not sure if this is because I've changed over to Apple, but the Apple browser renders the Hanzi font just impossiblly too small to read even when I am wearing magnified reading glasses. And the "enlarge font" option on the Apple browser doesn't seem to help with that part of the page (I think because the relevant page section appears to use Java).
I'd love to dive back into these exercises and bone up on my Hanzi some more, if CPOD could get a technical fix on this such that the characters were more ledgible!
Posted on: No Walking on the Grass
October 24, 2008, 01:16 PMCan anybody shed light on the origins of the accent of the speaker in the expansion section. Some of the words sound a touch different such as 谁 which to my ear comes outsounding as 水...sounds a bit lispy...
One of the biggest challenges I find learning the spoken languages is the different accents, especially say a Taiwanese/Shanghai/Singaorean/Nanjing speaker who also sound much more lispy to me...
Posted on: Military Training
October 20, 2008, 02:32 PMAndrew - I sympathize with you...on many occasions it has been pointed out that my Chinese is very feminine, and I don't think I picked that up from my 5 sisters either!
Posted on: Skiing, Not Ice Skating
December 14, 2009, 12:21 PMHow does one say snowkiting in China. I know the water version is 风筝滑雪。 Also, does anybody know where this is done in China if at all. To many trees in Yabuli. I am thinking of driving my kite right up the middle of downtown Harbin on the frozen Harbin River during ice festival, but fear the local authorities might not see the humour in this.