User Comments - GregE

Posted on: Looking for an Apartment in China

Cool, good tips!

Posted on: Travel Wedding

We generally don't use the infinitive directly in a sentence, we would alter it according to each sentence's structure in order to make the sentence sound more natural. If we wanted to sacrifice the naturalness of the English, we could translate some of the expansions as follows:

"If my investment fails this time, I will have wasted my many years of savings."

"If you attend four years of university and don't receive your diploma, won't you have wasted tens of thousands of dollars on tuition?"

"The peasants wasted all of their hard work."

In this way we can use various tenses of "to waste" in order to express the same meaning, but at the cost of making the English sound less natural. Additionally, I believe "be wasted" is actually a form of "to waste".

Posted on: Travel Wedding

When we annotate individual words that are translated as verbs into English we try to leave them in the infinitive form and alter the tense/conjugation in our sentence-level translations according to each individual sentence. 打水漂 itself also literally means "to skip stones on water" which makes it even tougher to give an all-encompassing, exact translation that is grammatically correct in every sentence.

Posted on: Travel Wedding

在这个情况下，你应该听jenny的 ;)

Posted on: Travel Wedding

Hey baba,

我听你们的 may express agreement depending on the situation, but more importantly it shows deference to someone else's wishes or opinions; it carries the added meaning of "I'll defer to you on this" or "I'll listen to you".

If you want to just agree with someone without belying agreement or disagreement, you can simply say 我明白你的意思 (wǒ míngbái nǐ de yìsi): "I understand your meaning".

Hope this helps!

Posted on: Looking for an Apartment in China

So I guess I did just have bad luck! An important thing to note is that the agents I encountered were all already advertising apartments; I didn't seek out an agent first and have them go searching according to my requirements. I think ouyangjun's idea of having multiple agents searching at once is a great idea. Did you have to pay all of them a fee even though (I assume) you only ended up with one place?

Posted on: Looking for an Apartment in China

I'm very curious to hear about other peoples' experiences renting apartments in China through agents. During my search for apartments I saw at least 6 or 7 via an agent and was not impressed with what I saw; the places were either covered in dust with various kinds of dead animals scattered about or were substantially smaller/more expensive than their advertisements online.  Are agents universally scammers or did I just have bad luck??

Posted on: Building, Establishing, and Creating

Fixed. Thanks!

Posted on: Building, Establishing, and Creating

Thank you! I guess I need to brush up on my elementary school history, ha ha.

Posted on: Punctuation Marks

I honestly have fairly limited experience with online internet forums in Chinese, but in both English and Chinese I tend to be like you, zhenlijiang, in that I use the exclamation point (probably to excess) to soften the tone of sentences. When I mentioned in the podcast that I see exclamation points much more in English than Chinese I was more talking about my experience translating materials for Chinesepod; when I'm going through lessons I often feel inclined to add exclamation points in various sentences but choose not to since they're not present in the Chinese. Then again, maybe I'm just a more emphatic person in general!!!!!

As for the ~, I've always sort of thought of it as just sort of a way to make typed sentences more cute but I'll have to defer to Jenny on this one. :)