User Comments - John

Posted on: Interested in Chinese Medicine

Yeah, good job indeed!

Posted on: Practicing Kung Fu

No way. My hair is indestructible!

Posted on: Farewell Dinner

It's true that Shanghainese speakers of Mandarin often don't clearly distinguish between the -n and -ng finals. Jenny is mostly pretty good about this now, but you might catch occasional slip-ups. At Intermediate and above, we're not quite as strict about the pronunciation for the non-dialogue audio because it's good to be exposed to various accents in your studies, and the southern Chinese accent is one of the most prevalent.

Posted on: Keen on Clean

Glad to hear you like her! We're all impressed at how quickly she got the hang of hosting.

Posted on: Keen on Clean

I think I adjusted the translation slightly for the 了.

Posted on: Keen on Clean

"Keen on clean" was my translation of 爱干净 (ài gānjìng). The Chinese phrase is a little hard to translate into natural English. Being a "clean freak" is taking it too far.

爱干净 (ài gānjìng), however, is a very common phrase in Mandarin, whereas "keen on clean" isn't in English.

Posted on: Farewell Dinner

Different people have written the intros at different times. I'm responsible for this one. Glad you liked it!

Posted on: Farewell Dinner

Hehe... More likely 尴尬 (gāngà) though... (Awwwwwkward...)

Posted on: Practicing Kung Fu

I hate the low horse stance so much! (I studied wushu very briefly in college.)

Posted on: The First Tone

Stephen,

As far as I know, there is no good, systematic, long-term approach to tones. I've started working on the beginnings of something like that on Sinosplice here: http://www.sinosplice.com/learn-chinese/tone-pair-drills

In the absence of a formal systematic approach, though, for most people tonal acquisition is simply a matter of long-term attention to one's tones, combined with corrective feedback (usually from a teacher).