User Comments - John

John

Posted on: Good Morning!

January 20, 2011 at 2:03 AM

Dror,

Sorry, but it's not either an "s" sound or an "sh" sound; it's a totally different sound that doesn't exist in English. (It just sounds like "s" or "sh" to us because we have no equivalent.)

The pinyin "x" sound is frequently grouped with the pinyin "q" and "j" sounds because they are pronounced in very similar ways.

Please listen to ChinesePod's Pinyin Program to hear in-depth coverage of these sounds:

I with J, Q, X

Ü with J, Q, X

Posted on: Funerals and Consolation

January 20, 2011 at 1:54 AM

No, you wouldn't ever say that to someone in this situation. It would be OK in a half-joking way for much less serious matters, though.

You could, however, say 他真可怜 to other people about the person going through a tough time.

Posted on: So (adjective) that...

January 18, 2011 at 3:15 AM

To add to the other comments about 给力, here's an article on the expression:

http://www.deluxzilla.com/DeluxZilla/Writers_Block/Entries/2010/12/23_Really_Ungelivable.html

Posted on: Concern over a Love Letter

January 18, 2011 at 2:36 AM

Johan,

In theory, a string of 3rd tones should all change to 2nd tone, except for the final one, which remains 3rd tone. In practice, though, which 3rd tones change to 2nd is largely a matter of how the phrase is grouped by the speaker.

So, if you have a phrase like this:

3-3-3-3

You're going to pronounce it like this, in theory:

2-2-2-3

But in many cases, the speaker breaks the string up into shorter strings using small pauses. So in the above example, you might actually get this:

3-3, 3-3 → 2-3, 2-3

In this dialogue, if you go to the individual sentence audio, you can hear a clear pause in the string of 3rd tones. It goes like this:

我的脑海里，满是你可爱的笑容。(comma added)

So the key part is:

脑海里，满

As expected, you get this:

3-3-3, 3 → 2-2-3, 3