User Comments - John

Posted on: The Little Tadpoles in Search of Their Mother

That's another lesson:

Upper Intermediate - Sex Education Class

Posted on: 康熙来了

I think at the root of this debate is this question: "how important is it to have a transcript?" A related question is: "in your studies, how much are are you practicing your reading, and how much are you practicing your listening?"

If you're OK with the Advanced lessons, then you're OK with the entire explanation and discussion being in Chinese with no transcript. (But clearly you appreciate the dialogue content having a transcript.)

Surely you agree that to be truly functional in a Chinese-speaking society, you can't be overly reliant on always having a transcript. But at what point does one start to try to understand unfamiliar content without a transcript?

The Media lessons (full name: "Advanced Media") are designed to be a bridge between learner-centric materials and media meant for native speakers. As such, it should drop the training wheels to some degree.

We don't mean to discount your feedback. I wonder if maybe these lessons are just not the best material for you at this point in your studies?

Posted on: Fog or Smog?

What do you mean by "your rollover"? In the dialogue, vocabulary, and expansion tabs of this lesson, all instances of 变化 say "change." This is somewhat ambiguous, granted, but if it had been a verb, we would have used "to change."

变化 can, on occasion, be a verb, but in this lesson it's used as a noun.

Posted on: Fog or Smog?

家乡 means "hometown" and can refer to anywhere.

老家, literally "old home," means something more like "ancestral home" and implies that you no longer live there.

Posted on: Fog or Smog?

That's right.

Posted on: Mending Clothing

You might want to look a little harder for a good tailor...

Posted on: 为 and 为了

Pauley,

It's hard to say without specific examples. The general rule is that 对 is more like "to" or "toward," whereas 为 is "for."

This rule is not going to work in every case. There are some phrases you're going to have to memorize, like:

对你有好处 (duì nǐ yǒu hǎochù) useful / advantageous for you

对身体好 (duì shēntǐ hǎo) good for your health

Posted on: 为 and 为了

I have to say that I concur; iTunes is Apple's worst product by far. It needs a major design overhaul.

Posted on: 为 and 为了

我愿意为你死。

Posted on: How Many Zeroes?

Start with the simple characters that are used as building blocks in more complex characters. I'm talking about characters like these:

人、大、日、月、口、木、水、火、山、女

Learn how to write these characters, and how they work as components of more complex characters.

Then, start working on writing the most common characters you encounter, like these:

我、你、他、的

ChinesePod offers writing practice through Skritter for all vocabulary in each lesson, but doesn't have a specific writing-focused course. You'll need to turn to other resources for extra help.