User Comments - John

Posted on: Second-hand Bicycle

Yeah, I gotta say, you're not going to impress many Chinese people by telling them about all your vintage clothing. Ah, cultural differences...

Posted on: Interested in Chinese Medicine

Ha ha... No, we never script the discussion of the lessons in the podcasts. And I am not the puppet master. :)

Don't worry, Jason will get more and more comfortable, and his personality will show through more and more. We're all looking forward to it!

Posted on: Interested in Chinese Medicine

Actually, we've been addressing it all along. We've always had some degree of variation in difficulty. (Yes, we have purposely designed easier and harder Intermediates, easier and harder Elementaries, etc.) The issue now is the proper sequencing. The variation isn't always apparent if you're studying all the lessons right when they come out.

Posted on: Second-hand Bicycle

Are you talking about the “除了铃儿不响，其他哪儿都响。” line? It's actually a pretty famous line. We didn't actually make it up, but neither did Communicate in Chinese!

Posted on: Nothing more than 而已 (eryi) and 罢了 (bale)

khadejah,

That's a pretty keen observation, but I'm afraid maybe our small sample size may have led you astray a bit. In actuality, aside from the formality issue, 罢了 and 而已 are identical in grammatical usage.

Posted on: What does she look like?

Thanks for that! I forgot to follow up with this important bit of cultural education.

Posted on: What does she look like?

I'm going to give you the simpler, more common approximations for those words:

肌肉很发达 (jīròu hěn fādá) - literally, "muscles are very developed" (this is a phrase rather than a simple adjective)

丰满 (fēngmǎn) - curvaceous, voluptuous

壮 (zhuàng) - strong, stout; often used as a euphemism for "chubby" (doesn't include the "short" meaning of "stocky")

宽 (kuān) - wide (not usually used for people)

Posted on: Interested in Chinese Medicine

ideotek,

You could understand it that way, but "genitive" is not a term used much in Chinese linguistics. 的 has a much broader scope of usage as a structural particle than simply as a genitive marker, and it's best not to pigeonhole it.

Here's a linguistic discussion on that: http://linguistlist.org/issues/4/4-1003.html

In that discussion, one person says:

"Perhaps it is a terminological quibble, but I would not call the 'de' in Mandarin a genitive marker, but rather just a marker of certain modifier-head relations, one of which is the one with genitives.

"I meant that these particles should be examined in terms of some general modifying function rather than specifically indicating genitive."

As a structural particle, 的 links modifiers to nouns, sometimes in a descriptive function, and sometimes in a possessive function.

I hope that helps!

Posted on: Nothing more than 而已 (eryi) and 罢了 (bale)

Our pleasure!

Posted on: Nothing more than 而已 (eryi) and 罢了 (bale)

Same goes for Jen!