User Comments - xiaohahaha
xiaohahaha
Posted on: Resisting Relocation
June 28, 2007 at 12:58 AMharrym At first glance it looked like finally there is one person that managed to be understood outside of the environment. Your bio indicates you do significant travelling. If you spend enough time in the environment, you will manage to be master what it takes to be understood. I stated before that's why I'm on Cpod. It is correctable. By listening and reading the lessons. I know one person from my class that now lives in Shanghai, it only took her about a month in the environment to master the tones. Understanding what she hears remains a challenge for her. The classes I'm talking about, if there are several english speakers in the class learning chinese expecting to talk to their chinese wives, this will never happen. Expecting to walk out of class, going to chinatown and being understood with strangers, this will never happen either. And yes I do speak French and Spanish, enough to be able to communicate effectively.
Posted on: Resisting Relocation
June 27, 2007 at 11:07 AMcertanly this place can get really boring!! However I've had 10 years to analyze the situation!! So far nobody knows anybody that learned to speak and be understood by going to classes outside the chinese environment!!! You don't know anybody, All the teachers I've had never knew anybody!! Nobody on Cpod seems to know anybody!! I wonder why?
Posted on: Resisting Relocation
June 27, 2007 at 3:32 AMThe reason I'm on Cpod is because this is my only last chance hope of correcting my chinese by listening and reading. I have no intention of reading chinese posts by anybody except those that I know are by people qualified to write good chinese. In fact I'm eagerly waiting for Auntie to post in chinese when she is ready.
Posted on: Studying Japanese
June 27, 2007 at 2:44 AMAnd just yesterday, at work we were talking about eating squirrel. One guy likes shooting squirrels to eat. I told him that a squirrel is really just a rat with a big tail! He agreed, but squirrels have more meat and muscle. I don't think you could feed a whole family with 1 squirrel, but I bet your whole family could enjoy a dog meal.
Posted on: Studying Japanese
June 27, 2007 at 2:19 AMHi changye! I used to work with a chinese engineer in Montreal. He was from Hong Kong. He told me the perfect dinner table would have the head of a dog on a plate in the middle of the table. I have to ask the question since I'm sure you are picking up chinese customs, do you plan to eat your dog at some point? i suppose there must be some special chinese diet that you should be feeding your dog!
Posted on: Resisting Relocation
June 27, 2007 at 2:01 AMPeople think that they can learn conversational chinese and that's why the chinese classes teach it! But it's impossible to learn it this way! it would have been much more productive to teach vocabulary, chinese structure full time with everybody keeping their mouth shut!!! The same thing is true for writing in chinese characters here on Cpod. We don't have anybody that has the proper training or knowledge to write good chinese! We only have bad examples to follow! The fully fluent people don't post here, it's only the people that want to learn!!! And that's the problem!!
Posted on: Resisting Relocation
June 27, 2007 at 1:45 AMI see a difference already. It seems you only had a tutor and the CD's to listen to. That's much different than learning in a classroom with other learners. Everything you listened to was good Chinese!!! We don't have that in a classroom especially when everybody is asked to speak. For one thing it would be impossible for the teacher to correct much if she ever hoped to move forward! If you have 10 people in the class, you will hear 10 times more bad chinese than the 1 time from the teacher. I would say that it's guaranteed that you would pick up the bad chinese very easily. Bad chinese meaning that we very quickly develop our own sounds and tones, even though we know the difference between them, they still sound different from real chinese. But because we are now outside of the environment, we will never be understood on the street!! Guaranteed!!
Posted on: Resisting Relocation
June 27, 2007 at 12:01 AMThat guy even had the voice of a real chinese. He was chinese from some Asian country, but refused to speak chinese as he was growing up. His reason for learning pinyin as opposed to bopomofo was that billions are doing it!! These same billions are learning the tones from birth, the learning pinyin later on in school. We do it backwards, we learn pinyin first, then the tones. This is why they can learn to speak in China, and we can't!!!! It's as simple as that!!
Posted on: Resisting Relocation
June 26, 2007 at 11:35 PMlearning the tones outside of the environment is the real reason nobody in this country will ever be able to be understood by those that live in the environment! I'm not consciencious of the tones when I say 'ni hao', I'm always understood. You may be able to understand people from outside the environment because you are originally from outside, but I bet that any real chinese will not be able to understand! Just last week when I was in Chinatown, I met a guy that was in my Taiwanese class. He was with his chinese girl friend. He said that she laughs at him when he tries to speak chinese. She was fluent! He said he has given up learning the language. He was the one in class that insisted learning pinyin as opposed to bopomofo. He wasn't interested in learning the characters. He just wanted to learn conversational chinese!!! He was dead serious in learning to speak, but we learned probably more from each other than from the teacher. We were outside the environment!!! As i was about to part company from them I said my normal thing "hen gao xing ren shi ni" to his girlfriend. She didn't understand what I said, but he did!!! Ofcourse. we were in the same class together. i am convinced that this is a global thing!! I'd really like to hear from somebody that managed to be understood by a real chinese, without having ever lived in the "environment"!!!!
Posted on: Resisting Relocation
June 28, 2007 at 2:58 AMI might add that the story was the same from all the guys I met from 4 different schools that had chinese wives. This is more than a coincidence. This one in particular guy is Vietnamese, has a Taiwanese wife. My teacher is Taiwanese, we often went to a Taiwanese restaurant to eat 'chou dofou' He often told me that if his wife would speak to him in Mandarin, he would certainly be fluent by now! To me this is definitely worthy of analysis!!