User Comments - yaomung
yaomung
Posted on: Where's the soap?
July 10, 2011 at 9:53 PMI assume the 2nd expansion has to with a context where the child and at least one of his siblings have been seeking their mother. Otherwise it would be 'his/her/its mother'.
What are the words in pinyin for liquid soap, liquid bath soap and just bath soap?
Posted on: Lots of Musical Instruments
July 9, 2011 at 6:16 PMI was thinking trombone would be 'zhōnghào' but I see 'chánghào' as
better because length is the first thing you notice about the trombone. As
it is so often, the Chinese are more direct, specific and concrete in seeing
and saying things as they are. May not make for politics & diplomacy where speaking in general abstractions and indirectness are so common but it gets the job done linguistically!
Posted on: Fasten that Safety Belt
July 9, 2011 at 3:16 PMA very minor point, but "Would passengers in the front seat please fasten their seat belts" requires 'seat' in the plural unless you want to change it to front 'row'. When I read this I got this hilarious vision of several passengers all crammed into one seat on a plane!
Posted on: Politely Declining an Invitation
July 8, 2011 at 2:10 PMAnother question I have is: Is it common in Mandarin in a compound
sentence to shift from one tense to another, e.g. the past in the first part of the compound sentence to the present in the second part. As an example, "Tā dǎ le hěn hǎo, zěnme huì shū? meaning "He played very well, how could he lose?"
Posted on: Politely Declining an Invitation
July 8, 2011 at 1:22 PMThank you, Jenny. Are the following Mandarin sentences examples of sentences that describe a change of state?: "Xiàyǔ le" meaning "It's raining" and "Bù xiàyǔ le" meaning "It's not raining". I picked these because it's raining where I am right now.
Posted on: Politely Declining an Invitation
July 7, 2011 at 7:00 PMI may have this wrong but I seem to remember John saying it is a hard & fast rule not to use 'le' in a negative statement. If that is right, then it seems that the only way you could ever know the tense of a sentence like the last expansion would be by the context, is that right?
Posted on: Annoying Ringtone
July 10, 2011 at 11:50 PMIn the 9th & 15th expansion sentences the simplified Mandarin should become the character for 'She/Her' or the English should become 'He's' and 'His'.