User Comments - John
John
Posted on: Renting an Apartment through an Agent 3
October 28, 2010 at 1:59 AMJack,
栋 (dòng) is for an entire building, whereas 套 (tào) is a single apartment/condo "unit," sometimes translated as "suite."
Posted on: Help Calling a Cab
October 28, 2010 at 1:35 AMAlso, before it meant "book," 书 meant "write." That probably makes more sense.
Posted on: Help Calling a Cab
October 26, 2010 at 6:35 AMBodawei,
Oops, sorry about that. I provided the wrong link. 泰康县 is in Heilongjiang; 太康县 is in Henan.
I'm no character etymologist, but here's what I found in Wenlin regarding 太 and 泰:
"The seal [form of 泰] shows the upper part to be a fusion of 大 and 廾 two hands, the lower is 水 water; the word is etymologically the same as 太 tài, and as 大 in one of its readings" --Karlgren.
And then for 太:
Cognate with 大 dà 'big' and 泰 tài 'peace'. Distinguished by a dot from 大. Don't confuse with 犬 quǎn 'dog'.
Posted on: Help Calling a Cab
October 26, 2010 at 3:09 AMAs an experiment, Jason just tried this. Connie and Jiaojie laughed at him.
Posted on: Help Calling a Cab
October 26, 2010 at 3:04 AM1. I'd say your "rule" is still a good one. You will hear an occasional "thank you" though (maybe not from everyone).
2. The Chinese name is 泰康路, and like many street names, it comes from a place name. In this case, it's a county in Henan.
Posted on: Renting an Apartment through an Agent 4
October 26, 2010 at 2:29 AMOops, I mean 物业费.
Posted on: Renting an Apartment through an Agent 4
October 26, 2010 at 1:35 AMReally? You guys pay your own 业务费? Suckas... :)
Posted on: An Introduction to Chengyu
October 21, 2010 at 2:51 AMXiaophil,
It seems like the best way to tackle chengyu with the focus you're asking for would be a separate dedicated series.
Again, we're focused on super common, high-frequency words and phrases for our normal lessons. We don't usually focus exclusively on chengyu, because our goal is to help learners understand and speak authentic Chinese (not the unrealistic and pretentious chengyu-studded Chinese that sometimes passes for study material).
Posted on: An Introduction to Chengyu
October 21, 2010 at 2:02 AMChanelle,
We do make reference to statistics, but there are no resources publicly available for spoken Chinese (the ones that exist are held privately by universities). To do this right, you would not a large corpus of spoken Chinese, and unfortunately, that does not exist right now.
So we can reference other (written) corpora, and also refer to teachers' experience and native speaker intuition.
Posted on: Utensils in the New Kitchen
November 2, 2010 at 9:02 AMYeah, making a sandwich is easy, but a GREAT sandwich... that's a different story! :)