User Comments - SF_Rachel

Posted on: Fast Cars and Shallow Women

I feel like the pigeon in the top right here.

As much as I enjoy expressing my opinion, I never intended to engage in a prolonged debate, so I really should have said much less to begin with. My bad. I’ve expressed an opinion, dissenting opinions have been expressed, we’ve all acknowledged one another’s points of view. ACHIEVEMENT UNLOCKED: yay for civil discourse. As far as internet debates go, less is definitely more so for myself, I firmly intend to leave it there.

Posted on: Fast Cars and Shallow Women

Are you questioning the puppy part of my post? THIS MEANS WAR!

Posted on: Fast Cars and Shallow Women

"I think you're reading way too much into this. "

Why settle for mass-produced thinking? I specialize in artisanal overthinking: all my rationalizations are locally-sourced and hand-crafted. ASK ME ABOUT MY PREMIUM MISINTERPRETATION SERVICE!

Posted on: Fast Cars and Shallow Women

Tal, Thanks. If you said that it made anyone think, I’ll take that as a big compliment, since I know it’s naïve to believe I can persuade someone to change their opinion with an argument on the internet. How we handle disagreement can highlight the differences between us, or it can remind us why we love humans; it's all attitude, so thanks.

I’m not denying that this stuff happens, as I said in my first post. In addition to the cultural legacy of concubinage you mention, there is also the imbalance in the number of women versus the number of men in China, plus the strong cultural and economic pressure for everyone, but perhaps men especially, to get married. Predictable result: women are extra-picky regarding mate selection. In the marriage market, materialism with an eye to long-term family well-being is not unreasonable. Emblems of consumerism can certainly be a helpful shorthand for financial stability, though not the best yardstick IMO. And I can see why many women initially filter their options based on romantic gestures as a proxy for devotion. I personally think that’s a tactical error only the young can be forgiven for, and it’s certainly a poor long-term strategy, but then my attitude on that topic has always been a little unusual.

And given that, absolutely it's reasonable to assume it will crop up in a dialogue now and then. My point was that there seems to be a change in how often it's coming up (3 out of 4 UIs in August by my reckoning), and the spin put on it that does seem unduly odious (the flirts, girlfriends, and wives have one-note characterization as unreasonable, short-sightedly selfish, and craazzaay) rather than the nuanced view you refer to.

This is an issue that is not likely to be well-served in a 2-minute dialogue. The short format does run this risk of just shorthanding the idea pretty judgementally: the only things women want or expect from men are money, obedience, and doglike devotion. Gee, sounds great! So my thoughts on that:

1. If the 2-minute dialogue format does the topic a disservice, and it was rarely a focus for characterization in the past, is it necessary to rely on it so often now?

2. If the topic is an important one that needs to be addressed, then the BST format would be a great way to go. If that BST were actually done, I’d love to listen to it, and I presume that Jiaojie will be invited and that she will do at least half of the talking. But if it’s not important enough or judged to be too potentially offensive to talk about head-on in that format, then perhaps they would be well-advised to be more sensitive about bringing it up one-dimensionally in the lesson format.

Bottom line, I recognize that the CPod staff is OF COURSE free to choose whatever topics and themes they want, and I'm here to learn language, not consume entertainment. It might be helpful for CPod to know when they’re creeping a subscriber out though, and that is in fact how I feel seeing the sudden frequent depictions of so many flirts, girlfriends and wives as one-dimensionally loathsome, so I spoke up.

Frankly, I'd just love a break from it for a while. Not a moratorium, a break. I think my original post did couch my request in some language that acknowledged that I may not speak for everyone, your mileage may vary, etc. If I am truly the only person who feels this way, well, hard cheese for me; I accept that. I'll just be over here, weeping.

Posted on: Fast Cars and Shallow Women

helzcurrah, you bring up a good point that the men in this dialogue are awful. And yet CPod saw fit to title the lesson "...and shallow women."

Yurts -- never not funny. You do run into this phenomenon everywhere, not just China. I think it would be tough to find a lady over 30 in any country who wasn't at least once in her life chatted up by some random awkward guy who in the first five minutes didn't explicitly present evidence (or at least, testimony) of his ability to provide for you and all the children you will have together! :-)

Posted on: Fast Cars and Shallow Women

You know, I'm going to back down a bit, or at least qualify my statement a little. I did a quick survey of the library going back to this time last year, and I see the attitude has mostly been in the UI level, and only has been really bad starting this summer. My issues with the problem seem to have started in June with "Marriage Hints," which I personally found loathsome (and, notably, that one probably was written by women). The issue just recently escalated with "Creepy Guy" -- which other poddies assured me was really about the awful women -- "Crazy Ex-Girlfriend," and "Romantic Movies and Real Life," all of which featured unreasonable, deranged women.

So while there's been a fair proportion of selfish, shallow, manipulative ladies in this summer's UI lessons and this one Intermediate lesson, the theme has not been so relentlessly pervasive as was my impression. Maybe one person on the staff was 失恋 this summer and is working through some bitterness issues. It happens. You should have seen the songs I wrote about my mutant ex-boyfriend when I was in my 20s. :-)

Posted on: Fast Cars and Shallow Women

ChinesePod -- I'm terribly afraid this is going to be flamebait, but (respectfully) do you think we could lay off the battle of the sexes for a while? Please? Once in a while is one thing, because yeah, stuff like this happens some of the time. But this year it seems like half of the dialogues have depended on really icky gender tropes and stereotypes.

Maybe I'm alone in feeling this way and everyone else is just eating this up with a spoon, but I am getting increasingly weirded out by the relentlessness of this particular trope.

I'm certain it's possible to do memorable flirting stories without making one or more characters unhinged and/or odious. I believe in you! Just so you know I still love y'all, here's a picture of a puppy. Peace.

Posted on: Dreaming of You

I'm perplexed by the particle at the end of this sentence in the expansion:

我常常想他会不会突然地出现在街角的咖啡店呢？

Does the 呢 suggest that the speaker is asking the listener if they feel that way too? Or that the third person will suddenly appear at some other location?

Posted on: Whether or Not to Use "If"

哦，谢谢，明白了。

Posted on: The Typhoon

"Chikipedia," very good. To try and better understand, I looked up 抓挠 on jukuu to find some examples. The examples given were ... interesting.