User Comments - andrew_c
andrew_c
Posted on: Relativity
March 16, 2008 at 6:44 PMI am being very critical, but my purpose is to let you know how this lesson is not useful to me (a grad student studying numerical analysis in a computational science department, which includes people studying relativity among other things) so that perhaps future lessons would be more useful to me. This lesson didn't even scratch the surface of introducing language regarding the scientific theory of relativity: half of the dialog was spent discussing an equivocation of the word "relativity" having to do this guys feelings for his girlfriend, moral relativity, the girlfriend's taste in men, not to mention some science fiction. Can lessons on science be limited to science please? There's hundreds of lessons on other topics, but so few on science. The few statements in the dialog actually discussing relativity are vague and borderline inaccurate. For example, the statement about general relativity didn't even form a complete sentence. I also lack confidence that you are teaching us the right words to speak about science, due to the inaccuracy I mentioned above, and that your word choice in the English translation is poor: you use "movement" a rarely used word in this context compared to "motion". It was nice to see "gravitational field" "general theory of relativity" "special theory of relativity". But for an upper intermediate lesson on relativity, I think you guys could go into greater depth. How about some *basic* vocabulary like spacetime 时空, Lorentz transformation 洛仑兹变换 Einstein field equations 爱因斯坦场方程, tensor 張量, etc. (I don't actually know these words in Chinese, I got them from Wikipedia) Frankly, from my perspective, it's a waste of time if you guys aren't actually going to talk about science the way scientists talk about science. For example, you're not making people like user42993 happy anyway, since as he or she said, he or she cannot even remember the last time they talked about general relativity. You're definitely not making someone like me happy, for who such topics are a daily topic of discussion. Can future lessons involving science actually be about science, with dialog that is spoken using the language scientists use? I'm not asking for lectures on physics in Chinese, rather to the language used to talk about science in Chinese. I think that a good start to making the dialog more useful would be to change the setting to something in an academic, science-friendly, setting, and not the conversation between a boyfriend and girlfriend.
Posted on: 一...就... (yī...jiù...) pattern
March 3, 2008 at 12:51 PMI just heard this sentence pattern when practicing with FSI. It might be another useful example: Ta1 men yi4 lai2 ti2 qin1 wo3 men jiu4 da1 ying le. 他们一来提请我们就答应了. "As soon as they came to propose the marriage we agreed to it"
Posted on: Don't Litter
January 27, 2008 at 3:29 AMI noticed that on Gmail they translate "spam" to 垃圾邮件 la1 ji1 you2 jian4. I find that confusing since the trash/garbage description makes me think that it's email I've deleted, not spam mail.
Posted on: Cold Beer
June 21, 2007 at 4:14 PMWhen someone asks: "Yao shenme jiu?", is "jiu" the only offering? Since this was translated to "What do you want to drink?", I wonder if I could I respond with "shui3" or "cha2"?
Posted on: Going to the Museum
June 21, 2007 at 1:08 PMWhat's the difference between nar3 and na3 li? Can you use nar3 instead in the opening question of this dialog?
Posted on: Relativity
March 16, 2008 at 6:54 PMO_O I wasn't expecting my post to be so long, sorry for being so wordy!