User Comments - John

Posted on: The Hunan Accent

From Wikipedia:

"The phonology [of Mandarin Chinese] is based on the Beijing dialect of Mandarin Chinese, a large and diverse group of Chinese dialects spoken across northern, central and southwestern China. The vocabulary is largely drawn from this group of dialects. The grammar is standardized to the body of modern literary works written in Vernacular Chinese, which in practice follows the same tradition of the Mandarin dialects. The name "Mandarin" originally referred to the standard language based on the imperial court in Beijing, but has been extended to cover Mandarin dialects."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Mandarin

Posted on: Doing Business in the Bath House

Literally, it's "however feels good, however (you'll) do."

Based on the context, you can get from there to the sentence-level English translation.

Posted on: Doing Business in the Bath House

Translation is not an exact science...

I don't think "resort" is appropriate; it implies a certain level of luxury that would be absent from most bath houses.

温泉 (wēnquán), on the other hand, are hot spring bath houses, so they only occur where there are natural hot springs. You can build a bath house anywhere.

Posted on: An Introduction to Chengyu

Xiaophil,

It's not that we're not interested in teaching chengyu, it's that we're dedicated to teaching useful, high-frequency language on ChinesePod (including in Qing Wen), and chengyu are just not that.

We regularly teach chengyu in advanced lessons, where much of the language taught is more literary and less high-frequency.

Posted on: Pricey Beer

I agree that the "still" translation seems a bit weird and unnatural in English, but actually, the longer you study Chinese, the more it seems like "still" also makes sense.

You're right, though, that the 还是 is hard to translate. I think that most often, in English we don't translate it at all.

Posted on: Walking the Bird

I'm guessing it's so the birds don't get unnecessarily freaked out by their surroundings, but I'm no birdmaster...

Posted on: Walking the Bird

You're right; 儿化音 (érhuàyīn) doesn't add an extra syllable, whereas in this case it's an extra syllable adding a cutesy feeling to the original word (with northern flavor).

Posted on: Walking the Bird

Glad you're enjoying them!

In this case, the sayings are not really chengyu, though. They're more like suyu (俗语). (Chengyu are typically 4 characters, and often completely inscrutable until you look them up.)

Posted on: Walking the Bird

And it's been in the making ever since then! :)

Posted on: Future Plans

Pretzellogic gave a pretty good sum-up. The only correction I would make is that Intermediate lessons typically have 0 chengyu.