User Comments - aert
aert
Posted on: Evading Nosy Questions
January 24, 2008 at 2:20 PMHi John The tone rules for bù and yī are easiest learnt together, as their behavior, depending on the tone of the element that follows, is exactly the same: bù > bù + 1, 2, 3; > bú + 4 yī > yì + 1, 2, 3; > yí + 4 The above numerals give the tone of the following syllable.
Posted on: Diving
January 21, 2008 at 1:16 PMhi Lydia1981 I apologize for thanking you so late for your suggestion in the Jan. 6th lesson. I didn't see it until today when, after an easy lesson, I browsed in the older ones. The suggestion by itself was instructive as liàn "chain" was one of the hundreds of characters I knew I had seen before but had forgotten pronunciation and meaning of. The compound liàn jiē was not in my dictionary, but I looked for a "link" and there was one. You overrate my capabilities somewhat, but here's one character I won't forget again. Every little bit helps! Thanks, and congratulations on surviving that Marathon translating session you once mentioned. Ik vind het knap, hoor!
Posted on: Is someone in here?
January 19, 2008 at 12:00 PMApropos of the puritanical replacement of "stone" by "rock", there is a story of an anthropologist who had discovered a tribe without a language. This later turned out to be a "secondary phenomenon". The tribe had been under the guidance of missionaries, who told them to use only words that evoked no sexual associations. Since their language had no words meeting this standard, they had given up speech.
Posted on: Bumming a Smoke
January 14, 2008 at 8:05 PMHi Eyux Not being an American but having lived in New York for nine years, I found the phrase "bumming a smoke" quite natural and thought no more about it when I read it. I must have heard or read "to bum" in the sense of beg many times. One I remember distinctly. Either Time or Newsweek had an early article on "How to stop smoking". One recommendation was to think of all the advantages of doing so, one of which was "You no longer have to bum matches" or "bum a light" (I forget which).This was probably in 1949-51. There is a considerable amount of lexical dialect variation in the USA. Famous examples are pancakes/griddlecakes/flapjacks and handbrake vs. emergency brake (the former in mountainous, the latter in flat areas). My American College Dictionary gives the whole entry "bum" as U.S. Colloq[uial].
Posted on: 好莱坞大片
January 14, 2008 at 7:04 PMHi Changye Unlike others, I was not really inconvenienced by the impossibility of seeing the PDF, because you provided the wanted reading material, which was more useful to me than the meanwhile available text, which I found difficult because I did not know anything about the subject they were discussing. I think I have not seen a movie for three or more decades (and I have no TV). You ought to be appointed an honorary member of CPod! Thanks! PS. The lessons are on my IN mail once more, so that I don't have to overwork Patty again. BTW, I know about computers no more than about 3D animations, but I found long ago that clicking on the first alternative under "Lesson Downloads" makes Windows Media Player give the spoken text and keep doing so wherever I go (c.q.the PDF file), so it is a mystery to me what all the excitement about pop-ups and further requests along this line are about. I am not in need of an explanation, there are many things I am resigned not to understand.
Posted on: 好莱坞大片
January 14, 2008 at 6:26 PMHi Culturedragon I would have thought "a tiny number" and I would have been wrong. My Chinese-Russian dictionary gives the item xì shù "detailed calculations".
Posted on: Bumming a Smoke
January 14, 2008 at 5:47 PMHi everybody Having read all of the above comments, I feel the other side should be heard, too. The anti-smoking craze is ultimately based on statistics. Well, one statistic that stares us all in the face is that as smoking goes down, obesity goes up. Put that in your pipe and smoke it! So you are looking for non-smoking areas? Come to Holland and try to find a public place where there is still a smoking section. They are rapidly disappearing. In my youth, in primary and high school and at the university, many teachers would smoke cigars during lessons. So did my father when I got home. The average lifespan.of the Dutch is one of the highest in the world. So much for secondary smoking. As for the primary kind, it was at one time shown (statistically!) that it tended to prevent Alzheimer's disease. True or not, this news, like the smoking areas, has vanished from sight. I spent many summers on Indian Reserves in Canada. When salmon were being smoked, the old people had the privilege of crowding into the smokehouse and saturating their clothes with the aroma. This would keep the mosquitoes away from them. It does the same for me when I smoke my after dinner self-rolled cigarette outside when weather permits. Why I smoke? For the same reason as I drink lots of coffee. I like it, and it helps me concentrate. And if there are people around who do not like it, I have no real difficulty abstaining, even when I know they are not suffering from asthma but only from having been brainwashed. Yet I wonder why the whole problem, like several other contemporary ones, simply did not exist when I was young (now 88).
Posted on: Preparing for the Heat
January 8, 2008 at 4:51 PMword by word translation: you for me cool friend now for-a-while from you part wait next year summer time can again each-other see []
Posted on: Preparing for the Heat
January 8, 2008 at 4:42 PMdà jiā hǎo The fan reminded me of a little poem quoted in Haenish's Classical Chinese course. I replaced only class. ěr by nǐ in line 1 and 2; in line 4 yě is an untranslatable final particle. Though I typed in columns (perhaps not preserved), read from left to right. nǐ wèi wǒ liáng yǒu jīn zàn yǔ nǐ bié dài míng nián xià shí kě zài xiāng jiàn yě . Addressing an object in a friendly way has a charm of its own. Columns preserved or not, it looks very much nicer in characters!
Posted on: Evading Nosy Questions
January 25, 2008 at 1:53 PMJohn and Changye Like John, I learned the variation of bu before that of yi, and about the latter I remained vague until I noticed the remarkable parallelism, which at the very least is a handy mnemonic device. As for yī diǎn, this is probably one of those cases you have to remember individually, as in English the word forehead has two possible pronunciations, the "full" one and "forid" (both sanctioned by the American College Dictionary), while in "bulkhead" only the full pronunciation is possible. Here there is no overall simplifying rule.