User Comments - John
John
Posted on: Personal Ad
February 26, 2009 at 8:40 AMzhenlijiang and others,
I'm a bit late replying, but regarding the translation of 非诚勿扰, while some people might write, "players need not apply," I think a more common equivalent would be "serious inquiries only." I think this matches pretty well with the literal meaning of the expression, which is "non-sincere (people), don't bother (me)."
Posted on: Finance Segment on TV
February 24, 2009 at 1:45 AMepatmaloney,
We do intend to do more business/finance, so we're happy to take your suggestions!
Posted on: More News!
February 23, 2009 at 1:45 AMChangye and RJBerki,
The new traditional support was designed and implemented with standard usability principles in mind, chief of which was "intelligent defaults." You get simplified Chinese (and not traditional) by default because that's what most users (especially newbies) want. You see the English translations by default because many users may not ever bother to figure out that you can click to show them (yes, I know it seems incredible) if they were hidden by default.
The cog in the corner is subtle, but it's meant to be that way. It's meant for power users (which most of you are) that take the time to delve through all the extra options and settings. The average user uses default settings and in't interested in changing them. (This kind of user also doesn't tend to be vocal at all on the site.)
In my opinion, the important thing to do now is work mention of traditional support into the ChinesePod signup process so that new/prospective users will at least know that we have it if they want it.
Posted on: Tech Fixes and Traditional Characters
February 19, 2009 at 2:54 AMhenrysmommy,
The new traditional character support mainly affects the display of onsite text on the lesson pages (in the dialogue, vocabulary, expansion, and exercises tabs), which are Premium features, but it also affects the PDF download links, which Basic subscribers do have access to. You can switch the download link to the traditional character PDF download link, or by clicking on "Show Extra Options" in the lesson settings pane, also choose to show both PDF version download links. (Your personal lesson feed has supported both for some time already.)
Posted on: Mexico City
February 18, 2009 at 10:00 AMThanks, Liliana!
I haven't tried all those places out yet...
Posted on: Pregnancy Series 3: Prenatal Checkup
February 18, 2009 at 2:57 AMchinachica,
Congratulations! I hope you can continue to let us know how it goes, and what lesson content is helpful, and what is not. The cultural issues here are virtually inexhaustible; we only cover a tiny fraction in the podcasts. So we'd love to hear about your experiences as well.
Water birth, eh? Is that a Chinese thing too?
Posted on: Lao Wang's Office 8: Trimming the Fat at the Office
February 17, 2009 at 9:39 AMhenning,
Right, as Changye illustrates, it's an implied comparison, and 没 is used in the "not as ___ as..." comparisons.
Posted on: Tech Fixes and Traditional Characters
February 16, 2009 at 2:17 PMbababardwan and calkins,
The option to view both types of characters at once in the popups has been available since this new feature launched. You just have to click on "Show Extra Options" in the settings window, then check the appropriate box to display them.
We're doing our best to follow best practices here by (1) using intelligent defaults, and (2) making extra options a little bit harder to find so that regular users are not befuddled by lots of complex options.
Posted on: Tech Fixes and Traditional Characters
February 16, 2009 at 9:52 AMhenning,
The reason that it doesn't search everything be default is because a significant amount of users complained that there were too many results in a previous iteration of the search engine.
There will be more results once the tag data is all rectified, then we can examine the default search options again.
Posted on: Personal Ad
February 27, 2009 at 1:55 AMgiannis,
Fair point. We really don't want to get too into discussion of stative verbs in the podcast. You can't just drop a term like that or make a statement like "it's not really an adjective" without explaining it, and then suddenly you're saying a lot about abstract grammar rather than language in context.