Chinese Pod members can't read Chinese, zhen ke lian!

pulosm,

Very perceptive! However I wouldn't say I'm an actor who "failed", I'm an actor who got sidetracked when I fell in love with the Chinese language and culture. For years I was completely consumed by it and studied for hours and hours per day, in fact every moment of free time was dedicated to improving my Chinese, so I had little time for anything else.

Now that I'm getting back into Acting (and Writing, and Directing too, back in the mid 90's I directed 3 independant films) I do see an opportunity within the Chinese market for foreigners who can speak Chinese, and TRUST ME when I say I know full well that the time to cash in on the "curiousity factor" is going to be extremely short.

Already so many programs on Chinese TV feature 会讲中文的高鼻子老外，programs such as "这里是北京" regularly feature those who've been contestants on　The 外国人中华才艺大赛 so for many Chinese, it's no longer such a novelty to have a conversation in Chinese with a non-Chinese.

As the Chinese economy and standard of living is on the rise, so will the expectation that non-Chinese living in their country should speak Chinese. I believe soon enough the gracious and appreciative attitude of the Chinese people toward non-Chinese who can even say a few words in Mandarin will give way to a more Americanized attitude (If people don't speak Chinese then they darn well SHOULD!).

So the point here is, while I think it would be wonderful to be the next 大山, it's certainly not my primary goal in studying the language.

However cashing in on a curiousity factor and being gawked at like an animal in the Zoo is not so bad when you consider any publicity is good publicity. The ones who stick around are those that after the hype is over show they have some substance to keep people interested over the long haul!

根据我自己的经历最有效学汉语的方法是从开始一边学说话一边学写字.大概个人更喜欢不同学外语的方法.可是对我来说,遇到某个生词的时候，只是学说出来,不学写的话,我就把这个词记不住.另外一个对我很有效练习中文的方法是多看书。多看着书我会纷纷遇到以前学过的词汇，让这些词汇沉入潜意识，这样就能长期记住。我开始看书看了比较简单的文章，比如“读者“和“青年文章“这种杂志。现在我刚才看完第一次从开头到结尾看过的中文小说，就是余华的“兄弟”。

This gramatically incorrect sentence means that in my experience it is easier to learn Chinese by learning to write characters right from the start. My mind works that way. The character and the sound fit together and make the word stick to the walls of my brain more securely.If you can read my Chinese, than you will also understand my second suggestion for making progress in Chinese.

Xiaohu,

From the standpoint of starting a post that generated lots of interesting comments, this was one of the more successful ones.

Xiaohu,

You want to be the next 大山? That's your goal? It sounds to me like you tried to be an actor in LA, that failed, so you thought you'd tap into the Asian market. It's true, Chinese people will clamour towards Chinese-speaking foreigners. Much like animals in a zoo, you will will marveled at. Much like animals on the discovery channel, you, too, will be on TV. Don't be mislead, though, it is purely a showcase of your Chinese-speaking abilities. In the end, people must realize how silly it all is--imagine if Chinese people got to be on TV in the United States just because they spoke English? It's laughable.

Hi Xiaohu

謝謝你，我很好。我的中文太不好了。不能用中文說我的想法。(xie4xie4ni3 wo3hen2hao3 wo3de zhong1wen2 bu2tai3hao3le bu4neng2yong4 zhong1wen2 shuo1wo3de xiang2fa4)

Phew! I am relieved that you weren't offended by my post. Being direct is not an entirely bad way to be, but in the setting of print communication, it can be misconstrued and have the opposite effect than intended. I think the "!" speak louder in print than in person.

AZERDocMom,

You do have a point. I guess sometimes I'm too direct, and (again) a bit boorish. I honestly didn't mean to hurt anyones feelings, or put anyone down. I just with others who are serious about their Chinese would want to be at least functionally literate in the language. Once you really get into studying Characters, you'll find it's temendous fun,and if you have a decent command of around 1,500 Characters you can work through most anything in a newspaper or magazine, you may not be able to understand every character but you can grasp the meaning for sure! I find the resources for learning Characters here on Chinese Pod, while not complete are still a decent place to start.

By the way, how have you been lately? 好久没见!

Mark,

恭喜你在走最好的道路啊! 而听到你常常用汉字写你自己的故事的消息,我很高兴!

加油!!!

Erodman,

So true, one thing leads to another and to another, if at first all you want to do is learn spoken Chinese just for fun, that's fine because it can lead to bigger and better things later on.

I perfectly understand that learning the Characters is no easy task, I hope if some users don't want to start off learning Characters, that later on they will graduate to learning them. Moveover though, I wish that are serious about their Chinese will start learning Characters early in their language development. Better sooner than later IMHO.

People learn what they want to learn and are ready to learn. If you are going to learn how to read and write, you need to be ready and you need to put in the time. Depending on your life and it's demands, you may not be able to commit to reading and writing.... you do what you can. It's great just to be learning. Perhaps what motivates you to learn conversation will eventually motivate you to do more. Whatever you decide, make it yours.

What an interesting discussion... I personally don't mind other people sounding 'condescending' or 'paternalistic' as there are only two ways to deal with this: shut up and listen to them if you think you can learn from them or otherwise just ignore them if you think there is nothing to learn. Or disagree with the point they're making by offering counter-arguments if you think you know better. Arguing about matters of style and tone is useless.

Back to the point on writing. I do think it is a very important skill to have BUT, arguably, it only makes sense to produce lengthy passages if these are perused by a native speaker who is actively correcting one's errors (which I don't think is achievable within the context of this message board). Otherwise it becomes an exercise of inventing your own Chinese language and imprinting your own (and other people's) errors in your brain.

Oops sorry that was 韧 (ren4) in word like 韧性.

忍 is ren3

I just learned a new character : 韧

I think you're speaking about 忍 in word like 忍心 , 容忍 or 安忍 but it's about tolerate and endure not about resilience.

Thank you for "你要想得开" (take things philosophically).

I didn't know that 想得开 could have this sort of resilience meaning.

dear kmkfr

there's a ren4 which means resilient - and some other bisyballic words with it as either first or second part, depending on whether you mean about people or things(tenacious or unbreakable) - the left hand radical for that ren4 is wei2 leather.....

my fav expression (thus far) about being philisophical is

ni3 yao4 xiang3dekai1, which i guess you could use to emotional resilience

sorry i can't write in hanzi

Btw, what would be the best chinese word (or expression) to speak about resilience ?

I first thought of 达观 ("take things philosophically" according to Wenlin or take some distance and observe according) but it doesn't seem to be exactly the same thing.

When you use the word "Perfect" you should also use the word "forego". Forego being "perfect" in other parts of your life, forego applying your perfecting skill to other areas of your life, allow them to sink to mediocracy for the sake of perfecting one area. Unfortunately, life is often ruled by the "screaming baby gets the most attention" principle and the calmness of learning CHinese is oftentime a serenity one can only wish for - an escape from the stress of a busy day. Being less than perfect in areas is not indicative of a lazy attitude but rather can be seen as striving for a "perfect" balance. Sure fluency in both written and oral CHinese would be the greatest Christmas present but so would reaching my running goals, work goals, personal goals not to mention doing all the stuff you CHina residing Cpoddies have an Ayi to do!

IL EST INTERDIT D'INTERDIRE :-)

不允许禁止 (bù yǔnxǔ jìnzhǐ) it's not allowed to ban...

Oh puhleeze, will you all stop making ever-increasing fools of yourselves and get on with what you're here for? Coz if you don't, I'm gonna jump through this screen and ram your heads together until each one of you guys has been forced to give all of the others a BIG sloppy kiss.

Having different opinions is GOOD.

Attacking each other because of them is BAD.

I'm bloody serious. Settle down or I'll do it.

Xiaohu, I would love it if by virtue of your example, just one person would make it their goal to smack you upside the head.

Somehow this situation makes me recall an episode of the old sitcom Silver Spoons (BTW: Ricky Schroder made a pretty awesome comeback in this last season of 24), Ricky's father says, (something to the effect of) "When people don't like what we like sometimes it's really hard to believe, for instance you're mother and I both live Italian food..."

Mother cuts him off asserting, "Are you kidding, I can't stand Italian food!"

Father, "How can you not love Italian food?! You've got Pasta, Cheese, Meat, Tomatoes"

Mother, "That's right EVERY DISH is Pasta, Cheese, Meat and Tomatoes!"

When people don't think the way you do, it is a bit disconcerting. I had hoped more users of Chinese pod had a stronger interest in learning the Characters. To me, why would one want to learn a language and then be functionally illiterate in it? It doesn't make any sense.

Like my private tutor always said, "Learning to speak a language is already hard enough, why not just put in a little extra effort to strive for the perfect?"

In this case he was referring to perfecting ones pronunciation, but I think it applies in this case as well.

I never forgot what he said, and I promised to carry the torch to promote "the perfect", so I challenged myself in speaking to sound exactly like a Chinese. To structure my sentences just like the Chinese, and in 口语，to say things in informal situations just like the Chinese people would. (to have a good command of both spoken and written Chinese)

To me, reading and writing are the MOST IMPORTANT OF ALL! Language is made up both auditory and visual components (oral and written), and to only focus on the oral, without any emphasis on the written, or visual aspect of language, I've found can actually hinder one's development in the oral side!

I guess in my own boorish way I was hoping to help some people on their journey in Chinese. Every person on this site is here because, in some way they're interested in the Chinese language. I want people to see how great it feels to pick up a Chinese newspaper and be able to read it! To go on the Advanced forums and post in Chinese, to exchange e-mails with Chinese people and actually read through them as effortlessly as you would English (or your own natively language),

I honestly don't mean to come across as a mister know it all, and I honestly wasn't trying to ridicule people for their lack of understanding of the Chinese written language. Trust me I know everyone here has a different goal in mind with their language studies.

Bottom line is, I would love it if by virtue of my example just one person out there would also learn to strive for the perfect.

After all this talk (and many excellent points made), I think it's important to look at this site objectively and realize that ChinesePod has never made (or pretended to make!) any real effort to teach the written Chinese language. Their goal has always been to give you a certain level of verbal fluency, but beyond that, you're on your own. The characters are provided with each lesson, yes, but no lesson I've ever seen has placed any emphasis on breaking down the character radical by radical to make it part of your assimilation of that lesson's dialogue. (That's not a strike against this site, by the way. You can't make a mobile language site and deliver it via podcast and teach the characters, too. It runs contrary to their whole business model. They cannot be all things to all people.)

This site is what it is and doesn't pretend to be anything else. If we're illiterate (and I'll be the first to raise my hand there), it's not for a lack of wanting. It's simply that we have to go elsewhere to learn it.

And, you know, I won't speak for anyone else here, but it's not like I don't have anything else to do! LOL I work for a living, blog for this site, and have my hands full in independent film. I'm doing what I can, but I'd like to get a few hours of sleep here and there. :-)

Last, look at the lesson ratio. MOST of the lessons are aimed at Newbies. People like us simply don't have the vocabulary necessary to participate in a shared story, and truth be told, given the amount of time I already devote to my studies, I'm not sure I'd play along if I did!

I'm chiming in here to provide a single person's perspective. There are a lot of reasons why someone may not have participated in your exercise, xiaohu. These were mine.

XiaoHu

First, it's nice to have you back although a bit rough of a re-entry I must say. I know that sometimes when frustrated or upset, we don't realize how we sound either in real life or in text. I hope you don't mind, but I feel the following 3 sentences in your thread text come across angry and condescending:

"...yet NOT EVEN ONE person ever bothered..." (angry)

"Therefore I believe the vast majority of Chinesepod users are illiterate in Chinese!" (condescending, at least the way 'illiterate' is perceived by Americans.)

"Does anyone here actually use the lessons to learn to read Chinese characters, or just listen to podcasts!" (upset and paternalistic.)

What do you think?

小虎，我努力学习每个课程的汉字字幕， 并且每个星期用汉字遍自己的故事， 就没看过你的故事， 而且就没有时间学习其它的资料。

'k everybody, cool down, go outside for a bit (it seems to be 'winter' with most of us) - or i'll buy us all one way tickets to somewhere in russia or the middleeast - where the most bloody 'literate' in chinese person would, perchance, be at a loss - some of us who aren't quite there yet (like have only been studying for a year or so) like to see if they can understand at least bits of the next level up - personally, i'd rather not get into writing or reading too much of a non native speakers blah, but hey, if you're feeling creative, go there - the golden rule is into, not out of your mother tongue but rules are meant to be broken- myself, i can read some trad, mainly food, mobile phone nad airline ticket words, cos soho in london is trad, and i can read maybe1200+ simplified, with some quite ecletic characters in there (like the word for mangosteen) but i can't read bengali, which is what all my neighbours read - so? who cares?in the real world, a smile is worth more than words can say, and when i went to study in beijing this summer for two months, i had a great time with a bunch of kids about 8 years old - every evening when i came back from school we practised hanzi together, and they took correcting my bad putonghua very seriously - they were a blast, and, MORE IMPORTANTLY, supportive and encouraging - chinese is my 6th7th language - course i'm going to make mistakes/need to ask for help/not be able to read everything - it's not a bloody competition,

btw, this puta doesn't do hanzi, so even when i can (in ten years time) i won't

much love to one and all - and get back to some meditative shufa

Or written in traditional characters as I should have included:

簡體字, jiǎn tǐ zì - simplified characters

繁體字, fán tǐ zì - traditional characters

AuntySue,

简体字, jiǎn tǐ zì - simplified characters

繁体字, fán tǐ zì - traditional characters

Sue, Words are what you mean them to be. In my opinion he meant this as a slam. I certainly could be wrong and if he tells me I am, I have no reason not to believe him, but I was answering his question as to how he could have been percieved as rude.

Xiaohu,

I think their are many uses of ChinesePod, some involving reading characters, some not. Certainly, there are people on the site that have a possess good writing/reading skills, and that's admirable. However, there's nothing with using the site to learn a little Chinese to use while traveling.

Yeah but some people can be so bloody touchy that there's no hope to talk to them in a relaxed manner.

I know a lot of people who are illiterate, but intelligent and proud people, who would punch the head off anyone who dared insinuate that calling someone illiterate is a put-down. And I'd probably support them in that. See, everything has more than two sides.

People reveal a lot about themselves in the way they react to things, often revealing more than they intended. It seems to me that the American culture is more prone to such self-revelation than for example the Northern European cultures. The differences can be confusing. Oops, there's another piece of egg shell under my foot.

Mr RJBerki.

Bravo on a very nice comment.

I think he sounded like an arrogant prick and so made it my sole mission to discredit his little posts with equally silly comments.

This complete discussion makes me smile quite a bit :-)

Why? Because the topic was obviously to draw attention and not realy assuming that you can´t read. ;-)

xiaohu, I do believe you did come across as rude. after an unexplained absecence of several months you suddenly appear (now interested again) and flood the message board with 30 odd messages that all said the same thing. Whats up with that? You dont think we can read english either? You totally swamped the system so no one could see any of the recent posts by anyone else and admin had to remove your endless repetitions to make things right. Surely you know how this works? Then the one different comment you make is to put down all the cpod users as not as smart as you because they dont add to your story which very few people probably knew about and whats more maybe just dont care. At least thats the tone of your message, intentional or not. You seem like a smart guy and obviously have a decent command of Chinese. Why dont you tell us more about yourself and where you have been and why you are back now?

I think the original idea is a good one but to come out with the comment that the vast majority of people cant read or write in Chinese is quite insulting. Whilst I am admittedly within the vast majority I am trying to learn but I will not be at the stage where I can participate in a discussion in Chinese for quite some time yet.

A large part of language acquisition is about practising and about having the confidence to do so without being slated. Be more positive and encourage people instead of put them down and I think you will have lots of people keen to participate.

I would love to join in but I am not at a level were I can be understood!

Obviously a lot of people are getting education elsewhere as well. I have not encountered the terms 简体字 and 繁体字 anywhere in my studies, and I'm not real sure how to pronounce them because I've never heard them. I watched people here blather on about something called "hanzi" for weeks before I had the slightest idea that they were referring to Chinese characters. I'm not real confident about pronouncing that word either.

It doesn't matter what it's like for me, but I give these things as an example of the gulf in assumed shared understandings that might exist with some other members too.

I have no problems about people inputting in traditional characters. But I must admit that I hardly ever take the time to work out what it could mean (was "raised" on简体字).

有人写简体字，有人写繁体字，没问题！

Learning characters via Cpod is a double headache if you live in Taiwan where its all traditional hanzi. One must navigate two sets of writing forms. What to do/ 沒 体 發 (I'm guessing my characters via pinyin input here) How do people feel about postings in traditional characters?

People have done some joint writing things like that on the Forum, with a lot more success.

That's probably due to the different frame of mind people are in while using the two different places.

Also I'm reluctant to be adventurous and take risks here when I know I can't ever go back and change anything, whereas the forum allows editorial control over one's own words. If you make mistakes that would mislead others you can go back and change them at the spot, not 25 replies further down the screen, so the Forum technology is more educationally sound.

If a typo causes some unintended remark, or you use a word that you had no idea was obscene and insulting to Tasmanians, it won't be archived on the net under your name for the next 25 years, you can fix it. So it's more comfortable, socially, and that too makes it a better experimental learning environment, IMO.

My guess is the story-chain format would have been better received if it was introduced by the instructional team. Learning to write/read a lengthy passage in characters is a priority for many of us on this list. However, you can't build a skyscraper from the top floor down. Xiaohu, its hard to tell if you seem dissappointed because you've overestimated the abilities of your peers in this community, or if you're frustrated that you spent a good deal of time on the story and hadn't received an outpouring of contributions (or any, I suppose). Credit the ChinesePod folks for offering keen and insightful cultural dialogues that attract a wide range of abilities and backgrounds. Some may find them tame, but cut 'em some slack for maintaining appeal to such a wide demograhpic. In the business of promoting multi-lingualism, there's no shame in being mainstream. Perhaps one day they'll create some tool for drafting passages that will also be level-tiered in the way the dialogues are...

I guess some people automatically react to simple descriptors like "blind" or "native" or "monolingual" or "bisexual" or "deaf" or "atheist" or "geriatric" or "illiterate" as if they were put-downs, not realising that others see them as valid ways of life or simple descriptors.

Rude? How do you figure that? Can you give me some examples please?

You probably would have had a better response if you werent so rude

Whether or not you like the Drug Dealer storyline isn't really the point. In fact the story I wrote doesn't really focus on him being a drug dealer it's focused on what happens to him after he get's arrested and delves into his background to find out that he very innocently came to this life of crime.

I was really hoping people would use it as an opportunity to stretch out with their Chinese (and stretch out with their FEELINGS...wink wink), instead of using it in the shallow, confined way of posting short blurbs in a message board.

Creating something and particularly telling a story forces you to delve deeper and forces one to recall and use more of their vocabulary. It's another way to push for true fluency. It's like the great chasm of difference between conversational fluency and true fluency.

If we're always just excercising a short list of words and sentence patterns IE: 你好，我好，大家好，今天天气，哈哈哈哈！， then our growth in the language will be severely stunted.

Ron,

I actually do like the idea. When forced to write you learn a *lot*.

I only do not really like that Drug Dealer storyline.

haha. Xiaohu, your enthusiasm is commendable but your logical conclusion that vast majority here are Chinese illiterate is faulty. The fact that learners use CPod lessons to learn characters is precisely the point. Where's the need for your non-native story unless one is interested in involved, chain story-telling?

I find the JohnB-Character-Group very useful:

http://www.88groups.com/character-insanity

I hope it will be kept up.

At best the character-insanity would be integrated in the standard Chinesepod-page and interlinked with the rest of the content in a modular manner...

...all CPod would probably need do for this is a small update of their server infrastructure, unknown to the users - like an iceberg....[I felt a great disturbance in the Force…as if thousands of of voices suddenly cried...]

I have found that learning characters provides another link for the brain to distinguish between so many words with the same sound or pinyin spelling and some with the same tone but different meaning. I dont think I could learn the speech without learning the chracters but thats just me. I also find them fascinatingly beautiful. Its very satisfying to be able to read a sentence and I find it a lot easier than pronouncing the words properly. To me I think it would be a lot easier to learn to read very well first and then armed with a hugh vocab and an understanding of grammar, learn speech, at which time you could focus only on pronounciation. I dont want to wait however so I try to do some of both.

Rj

AuntieSue,

actually that problem is less severe if you are using an input method like Google Pinyin which draws its conclusions from a tremendous database in the background and thereby presents the most commonly used words up front.

My problem, however, is that I often misspell characters anyways, because I am not always as careful as I should. In English this is no problem as a typo usually does not hurt the meaning, but in Chinese it more often than not does. Classical examples for Henning-sloppiness are confused

吧， 把 and 巴 or

那 and 哪 or

的， 得 and 地

This is aggrevated by arbitrary inserted characters (sometimes copy-paste errors, sometimes other leftovers from editing, sometimes coming from nowhere), here and there wrong word choices (for a long time I used 因此 wrongly), some grammar mistakes and the obvious "we would not say it that way in China" ugliness.

However, I will continue to write Chinese posts in the hope of getting better. That really brings me ahead. Be aware of the above mentioned issues when reading them, however.

BTW: My sexy-sysadmin-story has been checked and discussed with a native speaker, so it should be reasonably OK.

The only extra problem with typing (when you can read) is that if there are several characters with the same sound, you have to choose the right one, which isn't as easy as recognising or guessing a word in the context of a sentence. There might be a lot of low frequency characters in that list, all having one component in common, and if that component has been its main distinguishing feature when reading, the choice can be difficult.

Bazza, I can recognize / understand a lot more than I can produce, and I'm sure the same is true of most people. That goes for written as well as spoken material. There's a lot more knowledge that's not been fully digested and can't yet be called upon but is useful given the right context. Incidentally, that's why I much prefer material from / discussions with native or near native speakers.

I think typing and reading are probably equally difficult. If you can read a character chances are you'll know the pronunciation so you should be able to type it and you don't even need to remember the tone to type it.

I strongly agree with both of you, learning Chinese characters is essential. I'm learning them now and would advise anyone who has even the slightest interest to start learning them from the outset.

But I'm still not going to feel comfortable using them during leisure time with people who are so far ahead of me, both in literacy and also in general language ability, and on top of that using simplified characters which I don't want to learn yet.

Maybe there are other students who are not totally illiterate but for whatever reason have not acquired sufficient skill to feel confident joining in. Typing the right character is a lot harder than reading.

it is an effort to learn characters, luckily I started learning fromt he beggining of my studies, just because thats what my teacher made us do and i knew no different.

But i advice anyone to learn characters since once you get to a certain level you need to be observing those things around you (if you live in china at least) and reading in Chinese to improve since not much is written in Pinyin above basic chinese text books.

Also if like me you need to functional in CHinsese, in China, then you need to be able to read and write to do your job and generally be useful. speaking and listening is not enough.

I cannot write many chinese words, but i can read them. Perhaps you could focus on at least recognising them and usind the computer to type them.

不管是英文或者中文的，我基本上不读二三段的评论。

No matter whether in Chinese or English; I generally don't read comments longer than 2-3 paragraphs

AuntySue; not sure who your advising peer where/are but I think you're missing out on a huge chunk, you've basically decided to be illiterate in Chinese. That's a feeling I certainly couldn't accept, regardless of the challenge with characters (let alone the cultural, purely esthetic and cognitive dimensions)

我曾经写过一个故事， 叫"魔术服务器管理"。

好像很无聊。 除了Bob以外没人意识到了，没人看到了， 所以从来没写过故事也那么继续。

http://forum.chinesepod.com/viewtopic.php?t=1349

When I started I had a strong passion for learning to read and write, even more than learning to speak, but that was beaten out of my by peer opinion that one shouldn't learn the characters until later on, opinion delivered from multiple sources with almost no counter-argument.

It's a lot harder to pick it up now, because the right time for me has passed. When reading here and on the forum, I frankly ignore anything that's written in Chinese, even if I might be able to understand a bit of it, because I don't want to put in that effort with dictionaries and traditional character conversions (during non-lesson time) and then still feel small for not being able to join in properly. So it's easier all round to just ignore it and not let it worry me.

好的。

got it

ill read and add later today

I wonder why after copying and pasting it, it doesn't work?

Try it now.

http://chinesepod.com/connections/viewpost/xiaohu/connect/The+Drug+Dealer%3A+Part+2+-+Redemption

这样吧。。

快把你写的故事post在这里。我就给你写

这是上网、播客的生活，无论是英文、法文或者中文，有时候，有题目大家都发现比较无聊，麻烦回答。除了叙述故事以外，你还可以用中文答应别人的留言，我渐渐怎么做。但你要知道，大多数人这里不会读汉字、不少会读汉字不会写汉字。那无所谓，我鼓励你继续…

哦对，那个链接不灵了!

the link doesnt work

Even though chain stories sometimes don't end up to be that interesting (since most people aren't very good writers), nevertheless it's still a great way for users to really exercise their Chinese reading, composition and grammer skills, as well as being alot of fun!

Man2toe:

我的氧吧公司已经开好了可是从目前为止一个客户都没来租啦！ 不过， 今天一个客户来电话了说三十一号的晚上大概要租！ 一个晚上在活动租氧吧，一千块钱！很赚利润的，你觉得呢？

Chittywangwang:

你说，“可能” 我的故事不好了， 可见你在暗指自己没有读过我的故事，所以我给你一个任务好吗？ 当你看完我的故事以后你再来用中文给我们你的看法， 可以接受吗？

xiao hu, 好久不見. 你的氧氣吧(oxygen bar?)開得怎麼樣?

Personally, I was never a big fan of story chains.

I can read Chinese

And im sure many others can too...

maybe your story just sucked

I am currently learning conversational Chinese, from CPod and other avenues. I don't plan on diving into characters for a year or so. So, I don't use CPod to learn characters (at least not yet).